THE AFFORDANCES OF VIDEOCONFERENCING FOR EVIDENCE-BASED REFLECTIVE PRACTICE AND MULTIMODAL CORPUS RESEARCH IN TEACHER EDUCATION PRACTICUM CONTEXTS

Gaining access to data from teacher educational settings has been notoriously difficult, as it is often considered a highly personal endeavour. This is especially true in reflective practice contexts and has often led to criticisms of vagueness and a lack of evidence-based accounts. The forced move to online teacher education during COVID-19 lockdowns and the ongoing judicious use of such modes have provided new options for the way in which teacher education activities are conducted. As a result, there are many new affordances for more efficient data gathering for reflective practice and research purposes in these contexts. This chapter will explore how video-conferencing software (MS Teams, in this case) has proved to be a game changer for the collection of interactional and multimodal corpus (MMC) data. We illustrate this through MMC data from MA in TESOL students interacting online in teaching practicum/practice contexts, although the focus of the chapter remains primarily a practical methodological discussion. In line with this, we address the affordances and challenges of video-conferencing tools with regard to our research in language teacher education.