O n f e r e n c e

Françoise Blin*, Nicolas Guichon**, Sylvie Thouësny*, Ciara 
Wigham** 
*Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland 
**University Lyon 2 Lumière, Lyon, France 
[e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], 
[e-mail] 
Creating and Sharing a Language Learning and Teaching Corpus of 
Multimodal Interactions: Ethical Challenges and Methodological 
Implications 
Bio Data 
Françoise Blin
is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural 
Studies (SALIS) at Dublin City University. From 1 November 2005 until 1 October 2011, 
she was the Associate Dean for Learning Innovation in the Faculty of Humanities and 
Social Sciences. She was then on sabbatical leave until 16 September 2012, and she is 
now back teaching and researching full time. She am also the President of EUROCALL, 
and the co-editor of ReCALL. 
Abstract 
Reffay, Betbeder and Chanier (2012) define a LEarning and TEaching Corpus (LETEC) “as 
a structured entity containing all the elements resulting from an online learning situation, 
whose context is described by an educational scenario and a research protocol” (p. 15). 
It thus includes the interactions that took place in a learning environment, as well as any 
other data that will help describe the context of these interactions. In a CALL context, 
multimodal learning and teaching corpora provide valuable resources not only for second 
language development and teacher education research, but also for teacher training 
(Guichon, 2009). However, creating such a corpus, with a view to sharing it with the 
wider CALL research community, presents a number of challenges, including ethical, 
legal, and institutional ones, which have direct implications on epistemological and 
methodological choices. 
In October 2013, Dublin City University (DCU) joined 
Le français en première ligne (F1L)
project, in partnership with the Université Lyon 2 Lumière. As part of their regular class 
activities, eighteen business students from DCU were paired with Masters students from 
Lyon 2 (Teaching French as a Foreign Language), who acted as online French tutors. In 
the course of six videoconferencing sessions via the 
Visu
platform, tutors guided one or 
two students through a variety of tasks. Sessions were automatically recorded and used 
by tutors to provide formative feedback to students. Drawing on the LETEC methodology 
(Chanier & Ciekanski, 2010; Wigham & Chanier, 2013), this paper explores the ethical, 
legal, and institutional challenges that had to be addressed prior to the creation and 
sharing of the F1L Learning and Teaching Corpus that includes recordings of the 
multimodal interactions, and more particularly video recordings of the participants. The 
methodological implications of ethical and institutional constraints, which may differ 
between countries and institutions, on the creation and sharing of our corpus for research 
and teacher training purposes are presented and discussed.

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-69- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
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