An Analysis of Conversational Volatility During Telecollaboration Sessions for Second Language Learning

Abstract: Tandem telecollaboration is a pedagogy used in second language learning where mixed groups of students meet online in videoconferencing sessions to practice their conversational skills in their target language. We have built and deployed a system called L2 Learning to support post-session review and self-reflection on students participation in such meetings. We automatically compute a metric called Conversational Volatility which quantifies the amount of interaction among participants, indicating how dynamic or flat the conversations were. Our analysis on more than 100 hours of video recordings involving 28 of our students indicates that conversations do not get more dynamic as meetings progress, that there is a wide variety of levels of interaction across students and student groups, and the speaking in French appears to have more animated conversations than speaking in English, though the reasons for that are not clear.