‘I Remember When I Was in Spain’: Student-Teacher Storytelling in Online Collaborative Task Accomplishment

This chapter applies a micro-analytical lens to explore how two student–teachers of foreign languages, one in the USA, the other in Spain, engage in storytelling as an integral part of the accomplishment of an institutional task. The corpora consist of video interactions collected throughout the semester; however, this chapter will focus on two online sessions in which there are several storytelling episodes. As our analysis will show, these stories are integral to the student-teachers’ completion of the assigned task. Specifically, the two women mutually negotiate online the ‘business at hand’ in an out-of-class meeting: discussing materials development for classroom implementation. While the range of topics of the storytelling is wide, the student–teachers are not off-task; the storytelling actually supports the progressivity of the task. In applying a conversation analysis perspective, we identify how storytelling episodes are woven into the unfolding social accomplishment of the institutionally assigned tasks. It will be argued that the storytelling episodes help the participants deflect responsibility for incomplete tasks and justify ‘teacher-based’ decisions through displays of their epistemic stance. By weaving personal experiences into the social action of completing a university assignment, the two student–teachers create connections which display mutual affiliation during their online collaboration.