Collaborative Noticing of Multimodality in Language Classroom Interaction: A Telecollaboration Project Between Student‐Teachers of English in Sweden and Japan

ABSTRACT Telecollaboration in pre‐service teacher education promotes intercultural communicative competence and bridges knowledge and practice. Although a growing body of studies has addressed the affordances of telecollaboration for developing student‐teachers' (STs') competencies, research focusing on their knowledge of classroom interaction—and on multimodal aspects of classroom interaction in particular—is scarce. Using multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), we address this research gap by investigating the affordances of telecollaboration between STs in Sweden and Japan to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction. The study comes from a “parallel‐course project” that aimed to design and conduct telecollaborative tasks within the context of two pre‐service English language teacher education courses in Sweden and Japan. The participants ( N = 12) met online and worked on video‐based tasks using authentic classroom videos. They were grouped to conduct four online sessions (202 min of screen recordings) for analyzing classroom videos and transcriptions. Using MCA, a collection of 51 cases where STs notice and discuss multimodal aspects of teaching was compiled. The findings show that this telecollaboration allowed the STs to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction, including teachers' gestures, gaze, and facial expressions in Japanese and European contexts. We demonstrate that the tasks facilitate collaborative noticing, enactment, and functional description of pedagogical gestures. The tasks also allowed the STs to discuss similarities and differences between the pedagogical cultures, contributing to their awareness of classroom interactional competence. Our study addresses a methodological gap in telecollaboration research by employing MCA. Implications for telecollaboration and curricula in language teacher education, as well as for using conversation analysis as a research methodology, will be given.