Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings: The role of backchannelling head nods

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 understan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of corpus linguistics 2024-11, Vol.29 (3), p.389-416
Main Authors: Knight, Dawn, O’Keeffe, Anne, Mark, Geraldine, Fitzgerald, Christopher, McNamara, Justin, Adolphs, Svenja, Cowan, Benjamin, Fahey Palma, Tania, Farr, Fiona, Peraldi, Sandrine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Workplace communication
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1384-6655
1569-9811
DOI:10.1075/ijcl.24060.kni