Dealing with topics of potential cross‐cultural sensitivity among transnational groups of pre-service language teachers in video‐mediated virtual exchange interactions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24238461 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ufuk Balaman (0000-0001-5092-9414, Bilkent University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-20 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | AILA Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1461-0213 • E-ISSN: 1570-5595 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/aila.00065.bal |
| OpenAlex | W7223015526 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 80 |
Conversations involving potentially sensitive topics across cultures pose challenges not only for L2 speakers engaged in intercultural communication but also for researchers seeking to understand the mechanisms of such interactions. Digital spaces have long offered rich affordances to address these challenges — primarily by facilitating easier cross-cultural access and creating pedagogically and interculturally meaningful interactive environments. This article explores one such setting: video-mediated interactions among pre-service language teachers within the scope of a virtual exchange project between Türkiye and Poland. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the study examines how participants manage cross-culturally sensitive topics (e.g., religion and history/war) on a turn-by-turn basis during video-mediated interactions. I argue that virtual exchange contexts can serve as ‘safe’ spaces for ‘brave’ conversations and for engaging with sensitive issues, where topic initiations do not typically lead to tension or conflict — even when the legitimacy of the topic may be negotiable. The findings reveal that sensitive topics are managed through a variety of interactional resources, including laughter, topic continuers or shifters, extended elaborations, or brief and counter-argumentative responses, depending on the topic initiated. The findings offer new insights into the challenges and affordances of digital spaces for applied linguistics, intercultural communication, and language teacher education research.
counterargument · Humor · Intercultural communication · intercultural sensitivity · pre-service language teachers · sensitive topics · teacher professional development · topic initiation · topic management · video-mediated interaction · virtual exchange · War · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistics and Language Analysis
The Handbook of Conversation Analysis
From telecollaboration to virtual exchange
Doing Being Reprehensive
Co-construction of Nonnative Speaker Identity in Cross-cultural Interaction
‘What is Stoyr-Steruh Type?’
Claims of teacher learning and retrospective tracing of claimed events in video-mediated transnational virtual exchange interactions
'So You Are from England'
Features of Online Second Language Interactional Competence in a German-Israeli Virtual Exchange
Complaining for rapport building
Negotiating collaborative and inclusive practices in university students’ group-to-group videoconferencing sessions
Third position repair for resolving troubles in understanding teacher instructions
Dealing with divergent feedback trajectories in video-mediated, transnational, and collaborative task design meetings
Conversations about culture
Tracking telecollaborative tasks through design, feedback, implementation, and reflection processes in pre-service language teacher education
Crossing transcultural liminalities with critical virtual exchange
‘Is it okay to eat a dog in Korea…like China?’ Assumptions of national food-eating practices in intercultural interaction
Interculturality serving multiple interactional goals in African American and Korean service encounters
Reconstructing the participants’ treatments of ‘interculturality’
Constructing Korean and Japanese interculturality in talk
Resistance against being formulated as cultural other
Avoiding initiation of repair in L2 conversations-for-learning
Constructing membership in the in-group
Interculturality as an interactional achievement
Negotiating religious identity categories in non-professional interviews using English as a lingua franca
Intercultural moments in translating and humanising the socio-legal system
Word search sequences in video-mediated task-oriented L2 interactions
Saying and doing
Crossing the intercultural borders into 3rd space culture(s)
A Practical Task
The Routinization of Grammar as a Social Action Format
The Construction of Interculturality
Cultural difference as a resource for arguments in institutional interactions
Negotiating Understanding in “Intercultural Moments” in Immigrant Family Interactions
The use of Video Enhanced Observation in video-mediated post-observation conversations on pre-service EFL teachers’ online practicum teaching
Task design for telecollaborative exchanges
Topic maintenance in video-mediated virtual exchanges
Managing intersubjectivity through screen-sharing in video-mediated reflective feedback sessions in pre-service language teacher education
Topical Talk, Ritual and the Social Organization of Relationships
Doing interpreting within interaction
The interactive constitution of interculturality
Contemporary issues in conversation analysis
Student smiles and the negotiation of epistemics in L2 classrooms
A tutorial on membership categorization
Now we are teachers
A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation
Development of Interactional Competence in a Virtual Exchange Setting
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |