The Use of the Chat Window in English Courses from Emergency Remote Teaching to Synchronous Hybrid Teaching: The Case of Italian Universities

This dissertation explores the new multimodal horizons for interaction in university English classes opened up by the massive experience of videoconferencing during the pandemic. The sudden shift of teaching to digital platforms is called Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT), a branch of distance education that deals with a temporary solution due to crisis conditions. It is a multifaceted field that highlights the opportunities and challenges of emergency remote teaching for lecturers, teachers and students through qualitative and quantitative case studies. This study investigates how interaction develops in video-based English language and linguistics (EnLL) lectures and university practical English (PrEn) classes and the pedagogical implications of this. It aims to help implement digital classroom interaction skills (e-CIC) for lecturers and university teachers to become part of their skill set as the sudden need for distance learning cannot be ruled out. To this end, this thesis draws on an empirical study (from March 2020 to May 2022) involving 25 EnLL lecturers, 9 PrEn lecturers and over 1,847 students from 14 Italian universities. A convergent mixed-methods approach is followed, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of data from online questionnaires for English teachers and lecturers and for their students with qualitative microanalysis of interaction sequences from direct observation of their online courses. The researcher participated in online courses to examine both the instructor's/teacher's and students' perspectives, took photos of the screen, documented oral interactions and copied messages from the chat window. The oral and written exchanges were transcribed, integrated with images from class and analysed using conversational and multimodal analysis. The data from the questionnaires was integrated into the analysis of the material collected during the online lessons. The results show that the digital affordances of video-based conversation can compensate for the lack of non-verbal cues typical of face-to-face interaction. Consequently, this study argues that a deeper insight into video-based communication during the pandemic can help improve the quality and effectiveness of online English teaching in universities in future scenarios.