Collaborative activity in an online bilingual exchange: Social presence in an emergent collaborative community

Abstract

The paper explores the discursive construction of social presence in an international online collaboration of distributed language learners from different cultural, institutional and linguistic backgrounds. It utilizes and extends Galley et al.’s (2014) ‘community indicators’ as an explanatory framework relatively new to the second language acquisition context. Tentative findings from this research in progress highlight the prominent role of discursively constructed social presence as a building block in constructing and maintaining cohesive social ties. It is argued that collaborative floor and playful conduct are key contributors to cohesion and the development of community.