Managing student participation: Teacher strategies in a virtual EFL course

Abstract

This paper aims to explore teacher strategies for managing student participation in a complex Multi-user Virtual Environment. Data include transcribed recordings from a task-based EFL course in Second Life. Conversational Analysis is adopted to analyze the teacher’s verbal language output in the transcript, and a student questionnaire is used to complement the findings from the transcript. The results suggest that teacher strategies are influenced by task phases and also by the specific nature of Second Life.