Article In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings

The role of backchannelling head nods

ORCID logo | Cardiff University
| Mary Immaculate College
| Cardiff University
| Cardiff University
| Cardiff University
| University of Nottingham
| University College Dublin
| University of Aberdeen
| University of Limerick
| University College Dublin

Amid COVID-19 and the so-called “digital pivot”, online virtual communication is at the heart of our professional and private lives. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a corpus-based multi-modal study. It showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work focuses on the incidence, frequency, position, and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring coordination and co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings, which appears to be linked to the functionality of platforms.

Keywords: backchannels, response tokens, virtual communication, online workplace meetings, multi-modal corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Backchannels in communication
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data: A sub-corpus of starts and ends
    • 3.2Transcription
    • 3.3Coding
    • 3.4Analytical approach
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Form and frequencies of backchannelling
      • 4.1.1Overall occurrences across the sub-corpus
      • 4.1.2Forms
      • 4.1.3Form co-occurrences across sub-corpus
    • 4.2Backchannel functions
      • 4.2.1Frequency and distribution across the sub-corpus
      • 4.2.2Form by function
    • 4.3Continuers (CON)
    • 4.4Convergence tokens (CNV)
    • 4.5Engagement response tokens (ER)
    • 4.6Information receipt tokens (IR)
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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