Mediation in intercultural interaction Examples from a university-level L2 German working group

This article examines the question of how groups of foreign language learners interact and cooperate in a virtual learning enviornment. The observations are based on an explorative empirical study of mediation activities among US-American German as Foreign Language learners. The participants worked...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Zeitschrift für Interaktionsforschung in DaFZ
Main Authors: Arras, Ulrike, Schuhmann, Katharina
Format: Journal Article
Language:German
Published: Philipps-Universität Marburg 2024
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Summary:This article examines the question of how groups of foreign language learners interact and cooperate in a virtual learning enviornment. The observations are based on an explorative empirical study of mediation activities among US-American German as Foreign Language learners. The participants worked together in small groups via video conferencing on a collaborative task within an authentic academic context. The differentiated mediation scales and descriptors of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) Companion Volume (2020, German version), which are based on an expanded concept of mediation, serve as an analysis tool for the verbal data. The data show that the interactants use various mediation actions to accomplish the task. This provides an indication of the importance and function of mediation for interaction and its relevance for (foreign) language teaching. The elicited data further show that a collaborative mediation task is characterized by two group-specific mediation levels with separate mediation activities.
DOI:10.17192/ziaf.2024.4.1.8633