“Yeah, you know, these are the miracles of technology.” Interactivity in the COVID-19 ERT university classroom

COVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT, Karakaya, 2020) has been described as “an unprecedented challenge in university teaching” (Nuere & de Miguel, 2020), requiring lecturers to adapt or devise entirely new syllabi and testing methods in a very short period of time (Bryson & Andres, 2020; Major, 2020). This study investigates a relatively unexplored area of ERT, i.e. interactivity in the online and blended academic classroom, with specific reference to (1) positive and corrective feedback by the teacher; (2) student live feedback through open microphone; (3) face-saving and other repair strategies. We consider an intensive introductory course of English Language and Linguistics taught at the University of Bologna (Italy) by the author of this study, for a total of 30 hours. Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, 50% of the course was taught full-distance on Microsoft Teams, while 50% was administered “live,” with part of the audience connected online from home. Lessons were recorded, transcribed, and stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatized corpus in English. The results show that the level of interactivity is higher than it was the case prepandemically (Luporini, 2020), as students take and keep the floor on average 11.3 times for each 90 minutes lecture. Feedback is more positive than corrective, and repair strategies hinge on humour, sometimes eliciting spontaneous laughter in the “live” classroom. Although this may leave the analyst under the impression that students enjoyed this learning experience more than traditional ones, the data also show a high level of anxiety on the part of all participants, as testified by the remarkable frequency of hesitations, apologies, weak modals and pragmatic accidents.