“Sorry, one more time”: The Role of Resolution Strategies in a Virtual Exchange partnership

Abstract

With new technologies rapidly developing and the growing relevance of communicative competence in language education, Virtual Exchanges (VEs) are receiving increased attention in research within the framework of the Interaction Hypothesis. One of the intrinsic elements of interaction is Negotiation of Meaning (NoM), a process in which students attempt to solve communicative issues. Nevertheless, few studies have scrutinised how students solve these breakdowns in VE interaction. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most employed resolution strategies in three online audio-visual interactions. The participants are university students from Japan and Spain who carried out one-hour Zoom interactions. Methodology-wise, Clavel-Arroitia’s categorisation was adapted to the purposes of this study in order to identify the strategies in the corpus. The results illustrate how certain factors (language proficiency, cultural background, and communicative dynamics, among others) condition the strategies employed, emphasising the complexity of foreign language learners’ interaction.