Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings: the role of backchannelling head nods

Dawn Knight, Anne O'Keeffe, Geraldine Mark, Christopher Fitzgerald, Justin McNamara, Svenja Adolphs, Benjamin Cowan, Tania Fahey Palma, Fiona Farr, Sandrine Peraldi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Amid COVID-19 and the so-called "digital pivot", online virtual communication is at the heart of our professional and private lives. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a corpus-based multi-modal study. It showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work focuses on the incidence, frequency, position, and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring coordination and co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings, which appears to be linked to the functionality of platforms.

Original languageEnglish (Ireland)
Pages (from-to)389-416
Number of pages28
JournalInternational Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Volume29
Issue number3
Publication statusPublished - 15 Nov 2024

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