Tutor´s mediation in online teaching: describing the interaction and the implementation of the multiliteracies pedagogy at the E-3D Course for Teens offered by LabEOn

Abstract

E-3D is an online English language course offered by the Laboratory for Online Language Teaching and Learning (LabEOn) at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) in collaboration with students and researchers who participate in the laboratory. The purpose is to analyze the tutor teaching strategies used to promote the knowledge processes through the pedagogy of multiliteracies and online interaction to encourage the student's participation in the synchronous class. Therefore, this qualitative research adopts a netnographic methodology focusing on online interaction analysis. The corpus is composed of 5 recorded classes on the Moodle environment, which were initially observed by the researcher-observer and later transcribed for analysis. The E-3D Course for teens is an outreach action offered by LabEOn, in the second semester of 2022, and it has teenagers as the audience, aged between 12 to 14 years old. These students came from public schools in the region of Santa Maria-RS. In the analysis, we describe how the content was explained and conducted by the tutor and how the students interacted with each other and with the tutor, seeking to investigate how the knowledge processes (COPE; KALANTZIS, 2009; 2015) were implemented in the classes since these are the basic assumptions of the course. Results indicate that classes still focus on applying a didactic approach, evidenced by moments in which there is an attempt to dialogue with students through the elaboration of questions and the search for interaction. However, it is clear that, at different times, the tutor seeks to demonstrate the use of language by modeling, exemplifying how to pronounce and structure the use of language from the different situations addressed in the course. There is also a concern to monitor the student's activities while solving the challenges proposed in the synchronous moment and attempts to implement the knowledge processes, which preferably predominate the process of experiencing the known and the new.