Isotopic niche variability in macroconsumers of the East Scotia Ridge (Southern Ocean) hydrothermal vents: What more can we learn from an ellipse?

Aspects of between-individual trophic niche width can be explored through the isotopic niche concept. In many cases isotopic variability can be influenced by the scale of sampling and biological characteristics including body size or sex. Sample size-corrected (SEAc) and Bayesian (SEAb) standard ellipse areas and generalised least squares (GLS) models were used to explore the spatial variability of δ13C and δ15N in Kiwa tyleri (decapod), Gigantopelta chessoia (peltospirid gastropod) and Vulcanolepas scotiaensis (stalked barnacle) collected from 3 hydrothermal vent field sites (E2, E9N and E9S) on the East Scotia Ridge (ESR), Southern Ocean. SEAb only revealed spatial differences in isotopic niche area in male K. tyleri. However, the parameters used to draw the SEAc, eccentricity (E) and angle of the major SEAc axis to the x-axis (θ), indicated spatial differences in the relationships between δ13C and δ15N in all 3 species. The GLS models indicated that there were spatial differences in isotope-length trends, which were related to E and θ of the SEAc. This indicated that E and θ were potentially driven by underlying trophic and biological processes that varied with body size. Examination of the isotopic niches using standard ellipse areas and their parameters in conjunction with length-based analyses provided a means by which a proportion of the isotopic variability within each species could be described. We suggest that the parameters E and θ offer additional ecological insight that has so far been overlooked in isotopic niche studies

The role of multimodality in intercultural incomprehension episodes during webconference-supported teaching

International audienceThere is a strong case to be made for using telecollaboration in foreign language education: learners are engaged in regular, semi-authentic interaction; can develop strategies for learner independence (O'Rourke, 2007), be exposed to opportunities for negotiation of meaning (Kötter, 2003) whilst at the same time exchanging with 'real informants' of the target culture (O'Dowd, 2013). This qualitative study sets out to observe the role of multimodality in intercultural incomprehension episodes (IIEs) during webconference-supported teaching. These episodes are defined as opportunities in the online interaction (surprises, questions, miscommunications) for the participants to engage in periods of negotiation of meaning. They arise because the participant of one culture does not understand or misunderstands the member(s) of the other culture. During webconference-supported teaching, the immediacy of the visual images provided by the webcam may make a particular contribution to intercultural telecollaboration: the visual mode may mean that participants are unable to avoid or ignore awkward subjects (O'Dowd, 2006) but may also allow complementary information to be provided to help resolve IIEs. The pedagogical context for the study is the telecollaborative project ISMAEL (InteractionS and Multimodality in lAnguage LEarning) during which 12 trainee teachers of French as a foreign language met for online sessions in French with 18 undergraduate Business students from an Irish university. The participants met for seven 40-minute online sessions in 2013 via the webconferencing platform Visu (Bétrancourt, et al., 2011). Each online session was thematic and focused on Business French. A research protocol was designed around this pedagogical context. Data produced during the learning project itself were collected (webcam videos, textchat messages, audio recordings of collective feedback session with the trainee teachers, reflective reports), as well as data produced uniquely for the research project (observation notes, post-course questionnaires and interviews). Participation in the research study was voluntary-all 12 trainee teachers (ten females, two males) and 12 students (eight females, four males) gave permission to use their data. All data were structured into a LEarning and TEaching Corpus (Guichon et al., 2014)

EuroCALL 2011 Courseware exhibition: the VoiceForum platform for spoken interaction.

Showcased in the courseware exhibition, at the EuroCALL 2011 conference, VoiceForum is a web-based software platform for asynchronous learner interaction in threaded discussions using voice and text. A dedicated space is provided for the tutor who can give feedback on a posted message and dialogue with the participants at a separate level from the main interactional activity. In this way, the pedagogical input is always based on the contextualized needs of the participants, can be accessed as often as required and even searched as a resource for future reference. The software features a built-in sound recorder/player, a rich text editor and management tools to enrol participants, and create forums. Although still in the development stage, this software can be downloaded freely but must be installed on a web server. VoiceForum has been used extensively with French university students of English since 2006

A study of verbal and nonverbal communication in Second Life - the ARCHI21 experience

To appear in 2013. This is not the final version.Three-dimensional synthetic worlds introduce possibilities for nonverbal communication in computer-mediated language learning. This paper presents an original methodological framework for the study of multimodal communication in such worlds. It offers a classification of verbal and nonverbal communication acts in the synthetic world Second Life and outlines relationships between the different types of acts that are built into the environment. The paper highlights some of the differences between the synthetic world's communication modes and those of face-to-face communication and exemplifies the interest of these for communication within a pedagogical context. We report on the application of the methodological framework to a course in Second Life which formed part of the European project ARCHI21. This course, for Architecture students, adopted a Content and Learning Integrated Learning approach (CLIL). The languages studied were French and English. A collaborative building activity in the students L2 is considered, using a method designed to organise the data collected in screen recordings and to code and transcribe the multimodal acts. We explore whether nonverbal communication acts are autonomous in Second Life or whether interaction between synchronous verbal and nonverbal communication exists. Our study describes how the distribution of the verbal and nonverbal modes varied depending on the pre-defined role the student undertook during the activity. We also describe the use of nonverbal communication to overcome verbal miscommunication where direction and orientation were concerned. In addition, we illustrate how nonverbal acts were used to secure the context for deictic references to objects made in the verbal mode. Finally, we discuss the importance of nonverbal and verbal communication modes in the proxemic organisation of students and the impact of proxemic organisation on the quantity of students' verbal production and the topics discussed in this mode. This paper seeks to contribute to some of the methodological reflections needed to better understand the affordances of synthetic worlds, including the verbal and nonverbal communication opportunities Second Life offers, how students use these and their impact on the interaction concerning the task given to students

Object-focused collaboration in Second Life: the use of verbal and gestural modes for the establishment of common ground and in deictic referencing.

This study focuses on a French-as-a-foreign-language course for architecture students. The course uses the virtual world Second Life for collaborative building tasks in the foreign language and adopts a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach. The study investigates participant exchanges and, more specifically, how verbal and gestural communication modes are used in establishing common ground. Given the inherently object-focused nature of building tasks, it appears crucial for learners to establish mutual understanding of objects they identify and refer to quickly and securely (Hindmarsh, 1997). Diectic referencing, thus, play an important role in the establishment of this common ground. In virtual worlds, users are represented as avatars: semi-autonomous agents represented in the digital space which can perform actions when commanded by the user (Peachey et al, 2010). Second Life users can express themselves using text chat, voice and by commanding their avatar to use gestures. The range of gestures of an avatar includes kinaesthetic gestures (e.g. orientating the avatar in a particular direction), tactile gestures (e.g. touching an object to make the avatar appear to be pointing at it) and gestures of action (e.g. moving an object or changing the textural appearance / size of an object.) One of the affordances of virtual worlds has been shown to be that they favour collaborative learning (Dalgarno and Lee, 2010, Henderson et al., 2009). Clark and Brennan (1991: 127) proffer that in collaborative tasks, "all collective actions are built on common ground and its accumulation" and that the purpose of spoken language in such collaboration is to establish this common ground. Kraut et al. (2003) and Clark and Krych (2004) add that in distance collaborative tasks participants must have shared visual access to the collaborative task space so as to help establish deictic references. In Second Life this shared access is not guaranteed for the virtual world includes a camera tool which users can manipulate independently of the position of their avatar and this is not visible to other participants. Furthermore, in virtual worlds, visual access to collaborative tasks is limited by a user's inability to transform the course of pointing gestures to take into account emerging orientations and movements of co-participants. Fraser (2000) argues that this impacts on designating referential actions for co-participants and, thus, that there is a greater reliance on talk than in everyday, real-life, collaborative work. These characteristics of virtual worlds lead us to study the new relationships between the gestural and verbal modes. Firstly, we examine how learners employ these modes when engaged in a collaborative building task, in particular to establish a common ground. Secondly, we examine how these modes are utilised to reference objects used within the building tasks. Virtual worlds are becoming of interest for distance language educators (Molka-Danielson et al., 2007, Cooke-Plagwitz, 2008). This study furthers our previous work on multimodality (Chanier and Vetter, 2006) by introducing the gestural mode. The study is also one of the first pieces of research drawing on a CLIL approach in higher education

Architecture students' appropriation of avatars - relationships between avatar identity and L2 verbal participation and interaction

The synthetic (virtual) world Second Life can be defined as a social networking environment for it allows users to network informally by initiating relationships with other users, often strangers with whom they share no previous offline connection. Users can also connect with other users with whom they have previously established offline relationships. In the synthetic world, networking can occur by interacting, and later friending, other users whose avatars are proxemically close to a user inworld. This is facilitated by the feature of the synthetic world which allows any interaction between users in the public audio or textchat channels to be heard / read by other nearby users. Users can also initiate relationships through similar interest groups and choose to create a public profile, albeit relating this profile to that of their avatar or their physical world (first world) identity. Users who friend each other can view the newsfeed and interest groups as well as the list of connections of one another, and can navigate the latter. The development of social networking environments allows users to construct online personae / identities which may differ from their first world identities (Turkle, 2011). The environments offer new ways of communicating both verbally and nonverbally which imply new ways of being, of showing and negotiating identities (Nagy, 2010). As fully anonymous social networking environments, synthetic worlds offer specific possibilities for identity construction and new ways of interacting because users are represented in the environment by an avatar through which they communicate. In the language-learning (L2) domain, interest is emerging in this type of environment. Research suggests that synthetic worlds may reduce student apprehension concerning interacting in a second language (Schweinhorst, 2002) and increase the students' sense of presence and community (Nowak and Biocca, 2004). However, the questions of whether and how language learners use avatars to develop an identity, the impact of avatar use on participation and interaction in a L2 remain largely unexplored. In this chapter, we explore the above questions through the data analysis from an experiment designed around a course in Second Life which formed part of the European project ARCHI21 . For this course, a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach was chosen for students of Architecture whose foreign languages (L2) were French (FFL) or English (EFL). We explore how these students developed their online identities and how these identities were forged through avatar appearance and the use of nonverbal acts, including gestures. We examine how these identities impacted interaction. Firstly, how changing avatar appearance influenced how students addressed each other inworld and their level of verbal participation in L2 interaction. Secondly, whether constructing an identity partially through nonverbal communication acts in this social networking environment may have created opportunities for increased L2 verbal participation. In our study, no instructions were given to the students regarding avatar appearance. The research questions presented here were formulated after remarking upon how students changed their avatar appearance and used nonverbal communication during the course. Our study focuses on the L2 interaction during open-ended activities rather than question-answer exchanges which may be more typical of a non-CLIL learning context

Appropriation des avatars par des étudiants d'architecture et impact sur l'interaction.

L'intérêt d'utiliser des mondes synthétiques pour l'apprentissage des langues (Cooke-Plagwitz, 2008; Molka-Danielson & Deutschmann, 2009) et pour l'apprentissage de l'architecture se développe (Gu. et al., 2009; Garner et al, 2011). Cet intérêt, ainsi que le besoin croissant des architectes de développer leurs compétences en langue seconde (L2) afin de faciliter leur mobilité et leur embauche, a conduit à la mise en place de la formation "Building Fragile Spaces". Un protocole de recherche a été élaboré pour suivre et recueillir les données de cette formation. "Building Fragile Spaces" a adopté l'approche didactique Emile (Enseignement d'une Matière Intégré à une Langue Etrangère, Clil en anglais) et a été conçue par des enseignants d'architecture de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais et des tuteurs de langue de l'Université Blaise Pascal. La formation s'est étalée sur une semaine en intensif durant laquelle chaque groupe d'apprenants élaborait son projet architectural, en alternant du matin au soir présentiel et distance. Le présentiel était animé par les enseignants d'architecture ; le distanciel par les tuteurs de langue. Les séances en L2 (anglais ou français suivant les groupes) ont eu pour cadre le monde synthétique Second Life et ont incorporé des objectifs architecturaux ainsi que langagiers. Peterson (2010) suggère que les avatars renforcent les affordances des mondes synthétiques pour l'interaction. Lamy et Hampel (2007) exposent certaines interrogations soulevées par l'utilisation des avatars dans des situations d'apprentissage : i) l'utilisation ou non par les apprenants des avatars pour développer leur identité ; ii) l'impact de la personnification des avatars sur l'interaction ; et iii) l'influence des personnages incarnés par les étudiants à travers leurs avatars sur les interactions. Notre étude de la formation "Building Fragile Spaces" décrit le développement des identités au sein du monde synthétique (inworld) et des "online personae"(Turkle, 2011:11) des étudiants d'architecture à travers la dimension non verbale de leur communication et en particulier à travers l'apparence des avatars et l'utilisation de leurs gestes. La plupart de ces étudiants, de niveau A2-B2 (CECR), n'avait auparavant jamais utilisé le monde synthétique Second Life. Pour cette communication, nous nous appuyons sur des séances réflexives en L2 dans lesquelles des groupes de quatre ou cinq étudiants étaient amenés à réfléchir à l'avancement de leur projet architectural et à leurs contributions individuelles. Nous mettons en relation l'utilisation des modes de communication verbal et non verbal en montrant de quelle manière le non verbal donne des opportunités pour la prise de parole et soutient les interactions. Pour illustrer ceci, nous nous appuyons sur des données quantitatives extraites des transcriptions multimodales des séances. Dans ces transcriptions, chaque acte verbal et non verbal a été transcrit et codé. La méthodologie employée pour la transcription multimodale (Saddour, Wigham & Chanier, 2011) s'appuie sur notre recherche antérieure (Ciekanski & Chanier, 2008) et sur la méthodologie de constitution des corpus d'apprentissage LETEC (LEarning and TEaching corpora; Mulce, 2010). Les post-questionnaires et entretiens conduits après la formation nous permettent d'analyser le rôle joué par les identités inworld des étudiants dans leur mise en confiance pour s'exprimer en L2 (cf. Schweinhorst, 2002) et dans le fonctionnement de leurs groupes

Pedagogical corpora as a means to reuse research data and analyses in teacher-training

One methodological challenge faced by CALL research is how to reuse data and analyses in ways that bridge the researcher-teacher gap (Colpaert, 2013). Building on LEarning and TEaching Corpora (LETEC) methodology for structuring data from online learning situations (Reffay et al., 2012; Wigham & Chanier, 2013), this paper presents the notion of pedagogical corpora as a means to foster pre-service teachers' professional development through reflective practice. Guichon and Hauck (2011) identified four different approaches to CALL-based teacher education, including 'confrontation with research findings' and 'action research'. In the first approach, when trainers want students to gain skills in developing online learning situations based on interactive, multimodal environments, they have recourse to the reading of CALL literature disconnected from actual data. In the second approach, pre-service teachers participate in experiments and adopt either the role of learners or tutors. In the latter case, attempts to use the same methodology for both data collection and training purposes are often difficult to manage: trainers face the issue that student materials are often heterogeneous and quickly extracted from the on-going experiment and pre-service teachers may only considering their individual practice. Carefully documented and selected materials from online courses studied in their original context would be very helpful. Pedagogical corpora offer possibilities to observe, examine and explore selected parts of a LETEC with reference to a lead identified within the research analyses performed. These pedagogical leads pertain to areas for enhancing either online L2 communication or interaction management. This paper presents the methodology developed for defining their structure (i.e. ways of extracting interaction data from LETEC and linking them to training tasks). We report on ways in which a pedagogical corpus can be used in teacher-training classrooms. The corpus discussed (Wigham & Chanier, 2013b) focuses on differences in tutor and student perceptions of collaboration in an online ESP course and compares and contrasts reflections from a teaching journal (Lewis, 2006) with interaction tracks from the LETEC corpus (Chanier et al., 2009)

Structuring a CMC corpus of political tweets in TEI: corpus features, ethics and workflow

International audienceThe CoMeRe project (CoMeRe, 2014) aims to build a kernel corpus of computer-mediated communication (CMC) genres with interactions in the French language. Three key words characterize the project: variety, standards and openness. The project gathered mono- and multimodal, synchronous and asynchronous communication data from both Internet and telecommunication networks (text chat, tweets, SMSs, forums, blogs). A variety of interactions was sought: public or private interactions as well as interactions from informal, learning and professional situations. Whereas some CMC data types were collected within the CoMeRe project, others had previously been collected and structured within different project partners’ local research teams. This meant that the project had to overcome disparities in corpus compilation choices. For this reason, the CoMeRe project structured the corpora in a uniform way using the Text Encoding Initiative format (TEI, Burnard & Bauman, 2013) and decided to describe each corpus using Dublin Core and OLAC standards for metadata (DCMI, 2014; OLAC, 2008). The TEI model was extended in order to encompass the Interaction Space (IS) of CMC multimodal discourse (Chanier et al., 2014). The term ‘openness’ also characterizes the project: The corpora have been released as open data on the French national platform of linguistic resources (ORTOLANG, 2013) in order to pave the way for scientific examination by partners not involved in the project as well as replicative and culumative research. This poster presentation aims to give an overview of the corpus building process using, as a case study, a corpus of political tweets cmr-polititweets (Longhi et al., 2014). The corpus stemmed from a local research project on lexicon (Digital Humanities and datajournalism, supported by the Fondation of Cergy-Pontoise University). It was built starting from seven French politicians from six different political parties. In order to generate political tweets, a set of lists citing these politicians was generated (7087 lists), and lists that have tweeted at least six times and for which the description contained the word ‘politics’ were selected (120 lists in total). Finally, 2934 tweets were recovered. In order to be sure that we selected politicians’ tweets (and not, for example, those of journalists), only the accounts cited in more than 12 lists were considered; 205 politicians were tweeting. We took the last 200 tweets of each of the 205 accounts on 27 March 2014 (34,273 tweets). This allowed us to recover data that focused on the period between the two rounds of the 2014 municipal elections in France. The poster will focus, firstly, on how features specific to Twitter were included and structured in the interaction space TEI model. We will exemplify how features including hashtags that label tweets so that other users can see tweets on the same topic, at signs that allow a user to mention or reply to other users and retweets that allow a user to repost a message from another Twitter user and share it with his own followers, were integrated into the model. Secondly, the poster will evoke some of the ethical and rights issues that had to be considered before publishing a corpus of tweets. Finally, the workflow & multi-stage quality control process adopted during the building of the corpus will be illustrated. This was an essential aspect considering that the corpus underwent format conversions: the local research team had initially structured the corpus in XML whilst the CoMeRe project applied the IS TEI model to the corpus.The political tweets corpus is now structured and available online. Analyses have started to be carried out: some ideas have been launched in Djemili et al. (2014) but further analyses must adhere rigorously to methodologies stemming from the natural language processing (NLP) field

LEarning and TEaching corpora (LETEC): data-sharing and repository for research on multimodal interactions

The number of online environments language teachers can employ is constantly growing, offering increased potential for L2 interaction analysis. However, research cannot necessarily keep up with technology innovation. One danger is that CALL research will reinvent the wheel each time a new technology emerges. To better understand L2 interaction across different environments, Reffay, Betbeder & Chanier (2012) underline the need to share research situations in formats that allow comparisons between interactions in different online environments to be made and that are open-access. In the language-learning domain, learner corpora (Granger, 2004; Meunier et al., 2012) are exploited for SLA research. Frequently comprising data from test situations (Reffay et al., 2008) and used in learner-native speaker comparative studies (Botlon, Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet, 2012), learner corpora focus on learners' productions and consider neither other course participants (tutors, native speakers) nor the learning context. A LEarning and TEaching Corpus (LETEC) links, following international standards, all elements resulting from an online learning situation (Chanier & Ciekanski, 2010). It comprises a XML "manifest" which describes the corpus' components: the learning design, the research protocol (questionnaires, interview data), the interaction data (audio, textchat, video), all participants' productions and licences relating to ethics and access rights. The XML schema allows interactions from different tools and environments (conceptual map editor, blogs, synthetic worlds...) to be stored and described in a standardized way, facilitating data analysis. Interaction data is included in environment-independent formalisms. Our presentation will introduce the methodology for building a LETEC. Using data from a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) course which employed the synthetic world Second Life, and analyses into nonverbal and L2 verbal interaction in this environment (Wigham & Chanier, in press; Wigham & Chanier, 2012), we will illustrate how LETEC methodology may help sustain CALL research beyond the hype of the latest online environment