Videoconferencing with strangers: Teaching Japanese EFL students verbal backchannel signals and reactive expressions

The aim of this study is to determine the teachability and learnability of English verbal backchannel signals and reactive expressions during a two-hour videoconference lesson on English conversation strategies. The lesson was given by ESL teachers (n = 2) in the United States to EFL students (n = 35) in Japan. Five of the students participated in the videoconference. The remaining thirty were mostly observers. The paper reports on the collaborative development and execution of the videoconference lesson, and its short-term effects on the five participants' use of verbal backchannel signals and reactive expressions. The analysis of student use of these tokens before and after instruction suggests that the pedagogical intervention had a positive short-term effect on student production of reactive tokens. The paper examines the pedagogical implications of the obtained results for the second/foreign language classroom. It also addresses the benefits and challenges of using videoconferencing in teaching pragmatics, and discusses possible avenues for future research.