Online Interactions: Mobile Text-Chat as an Educational Pedagogic Tool

The reactions of education systems to the global lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic highlighted that there remain questions regarding how everyday technologies might be used to support mass education. This paper draws on Conversation Analysis in online textual communication to study key features of mobile text communication by analysing book discussions among adult students of an online reading programme. We captured and analysed three patterns of interaction (i.e., single linear conversations; intertwined conversations; trunk-branch conversations) as to their affordances for educational communication. This study shows that synchronous text has distinctive communicative features, including short text exchanges and various turn-taking patterns, which are different to the elaborated forms of discourse expected in schools. Though “disorder” and “messiness” accompanied the interactions, we take them as opportunities rather than challenges of education and suggest that appropriate pedagogic design may enable teachers to utilise this distinctiveness to develop various learning environments.