The use of the webcam for teaching a foreign language in a desktop videoconferencing environment

This paper explores how language teachers learn to teach with a synchronous multimodal setup(Skype), and it focuses on their use of the webcam during the pedagogical interaction. First, weanalyze the ways that French graduate students learning to teach online use the multimodalresources available in a desktop videoconferencing (DVC) environment to monitor pedagogicalinteractions with intermediate level learners of French in a North-American university. Then, weexamine communicational and pedagogical aspects of this process which involves orchestratingdifferent modalities and deploying various regulations for ‘‘semio-pedagogical’’ purposes. Wedefine semio-pedagogical skills as the capacity to mediate a pedagogical interaction by combiningor dissociating modalities (written, oral, and/or video) that are adapted to objectives and to thecognitive requisites of the task. We posit that these skills have to become part of the professionalrepertoire of future teachers, as they will increasingly be required to exploit the multimodalpotentialities of online communication in their teaching.The study draws on screen capture recordings of teacher trainee-student interactions and iscompleted by semi-directive interviews with teacher trainees (n55). It aims (1) to identify theimportance of webcamming in the share of the pedagogical range available to teachers and (2)analyze the non verbal dimension of pedagogical communication via DVC.The outcome of this study is the identification of five degrees of utilization of the webcammedium: there a certain gradation in the way webcamming is used (with a more or less significantuse of image) when compared to other modalities. The different uses that are identified varyaccording to the perceived usefulness of webcamming to monitor teaching and to the teachertrainees’ capacity to manage different workspaces