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La videoconferencia forma parte de las modalidades de conducta interactiva del siglo XXI y pese a que los estudios que describen el funcionamiento de este tipo de conversación digital aún son escasos, en los últimos años la apertura de las reuniones en línea sí ha recibido cierta atención investigadora (cf. Mondada, 2010; Licoppe et al., 2014; Santos Muñoz,2016). La presente comunicación se enfoca en la descripción de varias secuencias y fenómenos interactivos los cuales aparecende forma sistemática en los preámbulos de reuniones llevadas a cabo en español a través de Adobe Connect, 7.0. En esta presentación partiremos de la adaptación de la metodología del Análisis Conversacional (AC) a entornos de videoconferencia para mostrar, en primer lugar, la estructura típica de este tipo de encuentros digitales multimodales. En segundo lugar, apoyándonos en ejemplos extraídos de un corpus audiovisual, mostraremos diferentes ejemplos de secuencias características en las que se observa cómo los participantes, a medida que avanza la interacción, ponen en funcionamiento una serie de prácticas interactivas mediante las cuales se va estableciendo de forma coordinada la situación de copresencia y disponibilidad recíproca típicas de las tradicionales secuencias de llamada-respuesta y saludo (cf. Schegloff, 1968; Kendon, 1990). De esta manera también se corrobora la función última del preámbulo de las reuniones por videoconferencia: asegurar la eficacia de la interacción posterior.

Videoconference interaction is one of the most popular interactive modalities of the 21st Century and this modality is also very extended within the University context. In Sweden, for example, the number of online courses  increases continously and it is a fact that online teaching still carries several challenges. In the case of online language teaching the practice of spoken language continues being considered one of these main challenges, in part due to a lack of description of the conversational patterns through videoconference (Santos Muñoz, 2016).

In the present paper I focus on the description of the checking sequence of audio and video channels (SCH). Within videoconference, the SCH sequence appears systematically at the beginning of the conversation, presenting both similarities and notable differences with the traditional greeting sequence and summons sequence in face-to-face modalities (Schegloff, 1968; Gallardo Paúls, 1993). Based on the analysis of examples of real interactions extracted from an audovisual corpus of meetings among sutdents of Spanish, I will show, firstly, how the SCH is mainly oriented to help with the development of the subsequent oral interaction among the participants;  secondly I will show how in many occasions the SCH sequence becomes the first thematic sequence of the spoken conversation, a fact that may be relevant not only for the effective establishment of the conversation itself but also from a didactic perspective, because the way it is produced may affect the (in)adequate performance of the SCH sequence, and this in the end may have consequences affecting the (un)effectiveness of the subsequent interaction among the online students.

In computer-mediated communication (CMC) and video-mediated communication (VMC), conveying availability at the beginning of an encounter may become an intricate interactional task to be solved jointly by participants. Based on the analysis of 18 openings in multi-party videoconference meetings in Spanish, this article addresses how participants initiate interaction without a moderator. Taking Conversation Analysis (CA) as a methodological point of departure, the study shows that being present online does not necessarily indicate being available; even so, availability is one of the first interactional issues to be addressed at the beginning of an online interaction. The analysis illustrates how participants use different resources in order to display availability progressively during the three phases of the pre-meeting, and how interaction is unfolded until the establishment of mutual availability is accomplished. The findings lead to a discussion of the necessity for expanded notions like availability in CMC and VMC settings, in which the initial interactional problem is solved gradually.