“Let’s talk about el catalan’s”: Student teachers’ use of plurilingual and plurimodal resources in WhatsApp interaction

In this chapter, we explore code-switching choices in a multimodal mobile-supported exchange between future foreign language teachers, paying particular attention to the impact of the co-participants’ code-switching on the sequentiality of the interaction. Extending from the observation that emoji may have more communicative purposes than simply conveying emotions or pictorially representing facial expressions or gestures (Kelly and Watts, 2015), it is suggested that emojis may be deployed to orchestrate the interaction (e.g. mitigation through humour) or to elicit a next-turn interaction from other participants (e.g. orientation of an expected response). This study, which uses Conversation Analysis (CA), seeks to deepen our understanding of the impact of technology on interactional practices in intercultural settings by exploring a WhatsApp interaction during a Virtual Exchange (VE) in a language teacher education course.