Supporting student-led interactions in virtual exchange

Abstract Virtual exchange (VE) is becoming integral to many university curricula, yet students navigate VE with varying degrees of success. Despite extensive research, the role of oral interaction skills remains underexplored, especially in VE, where interactional conditions diverge from those in the classroom. This study applies conversation analysis to a fifteen-hour corpus of video-recorded meetings with students from Germany, Israel, and Spain, collaborating in online intercultural groups of three or four in an English-as-a-lingua-franca setting. Focusing on three features of the student-led interactions, namely task management, translanguaging, and cultural incidents, our findings show that conversation flow is enhanced when task management is collaborative, inclusive, and explicit, translanguaging is used strategically without excluding others, and cultural incidents are addressed constructively. These findings have important pedagogic implications for developing interactional and intercultural competence and provide essential preparation for both online and face-to-face language learners.