This study aims to discuss and clarify how classroom participants, who are urgently required to respond to the rapid changes in classroom formats (face-to-face - online - hybrid) in the COVID-19 pandemic that began in late 2019, will adapt and establish new forms of communication styles in their educational settings. In this study, we define "resilience" as the adaptability of such participants during COVID-19 pandemic. In order to achieve the goal above, we will examine some actual cases in graduate seminar courses and illustrate how resilience has been established.

This colloquium consists of four presentations. The first will be presented by Satsuki Inaba (Osaka University) titled “The "New Classroom" as an institutional "ba".” The purpose of this presentation is to analyse and discuss how the “new classroom” as an institutional place, “ba”, was constructed in graduate seminars classes from data recorded through 2019 to 2023. In particular, this presentation will focus on student presentations, and clarify what kind of presentation methods, equipment and tools participants used, as well as how classroom layouts changed. This presentation refers to the research questions as follows: RQ1: How were seminar presentations conducted in graduate classes from 2019 to 2023; RQ2: How did participants adapt their presentations in the classrooms; RQ3: How was the "new classroom" as an institutional “ba” constructed? This study will answer these questions using “Common Ground (Clark 1996; Kecskés and Zhang 2009; Tanaka 2019)” as a framework. The results showed that in-person classes in 2019 mainly used printed handouts during presentations, and projectors and screens were supplementary. In 2021, during the pandemic, since it was not possible to distribute handouts directly to participants, the presentation materials were shared on the screen in the online classes. While screen sharing, the presenter called out to the participants as a “contextualization cue (Gumperz 1982)”, and the faculty and other students responded with nods or replies. In addition, while participants were observing the screen and checking materials, the presenter remained silent as they were unable to grasp what the participants were doing. When the presenter and the teacher explained what they were doing, the meaning of the silence was explicitly verbalized. In the hybrid class, the presenter provided screen sharing and audio confirmation from an in-person classroom. The in-person classroom participants also joined the online meeting. It was found that both in-person and online participants were using the mute and camera off functions to avoid line congestion. When an online participant had a presentation in hybrid class, both in-person and online participants adapted the new way of the classroom using breakout rooms. Since the pandemic began, the "new classroom ba" was developed with innovative modern technologies. It was found that participants flexibly adjusted to the atypical situation and the new types of classes, continuing to establish their “common ground” in the classes. The implicit norms such as how to share materials, how to start presentations or how to behave in the class were shared as the “emergent common ground (Kecskés and Zhang 2009)” among the participants as the class format changed through the pandemic.

Second presentation will be conducted showing the result of analysis by Yumi Yamamoto(Osaka University/Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts) and Yingqian Zhang (Osaka University) titled “Process of Co-Constructing Common Ground While Addressing Communicational Troubles in Online and Hybrid Classes,” Their research explores communicational troubles that occur in online and hybrid classes by investigating how participants perceive and overcome the troubles and collaboratively build up common ground. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, online and hybrid classes bring about communicational troubles due to the use of the internet, electronic devices, and online meeting software, which were unprecedented in traditional face-to-face classes. We postulate that class participants, including the teacher and students, co-construct common ground in order to adapt to the transition of class format changes. The current research attempts to accommodate previous theories of common ground to analyse videos shot at doctoral seminar classes. Kecskes and Zhang(2009) proposes a socio-cognitive approach to common ground integrated traditional pragmatic and cognitive views and thus offers a holistic picture to capture both the cooperative and egocentric aspects of constructing common ground in communication. The socio-cognitive approach considers common ground to be composed of core common ground and emergent common ground. The former can be further classified into three categories: common sense, culture sense, and formal sense, and they are respectively mainly contributed by the knowledge of nature science, the knowledge of social science, and the knowledge of linguistic systems. In the current research, we found that besides the three kinds of core common ground mentioned above, the participants are also expected to have a good command of the knowledge of the internet, electronic devices, and software necessary for participating in online and hybrid classes. However, due to the rapid changes in class format, the extent of knowledge to which the participants hold varies widely, which can lead to a lack of common ground on how to proceed with the class and a hidden risk of communicational troubles. To keep the class running normally, most of the participants, if not all of them, have to collectively build up emergent common ground, which includes shared sense and current sense, to facilitate the class and finally contribute to the construction of long-term core common ground. Tanaka(2019) incorporates the concept of repair from conversation analysis and develops Kecskes and Zhang(2009)'s socio-cognitive view into a four-phase analytical framework for common ground, describing how the speaker and the hearer cooperate to repair communicational errors that usually arise from the speaker's egocentrism and co-construct common ground. This model, however, fails to apply to the analysis of communicational troubles in online and hybrid classes, because it presumes one speaker brings a priori knowledge to the conversation. In contrast, we observed that communication issues in online or hybrid classes are more likely to derive from the lack of previous experience. That is, none of the participants hold a priori knowledge about what exactly happened, what probably is the reason, and how to deal with it. Therefore, adopting Hata(2019)'s suggestion that anything related to common grounding, such as recognition and knowledge, would apply to the process of constructing common ground, we take in a wider definition of common ground and accommodate previous models to analyze how participants in online and hybrid classes co-construct from zero common ground of communicational troubles. The current research picks up several episodes where representational communicational troubles in online and hybrid classes and addresses these research questions: 1) what kinds of communicational troubles occur in online and hybrid classes; 2) how do the participants deal with the troubles; 3) by dealing with the troubles, how do the participants collaboratively construct common ground? As the results of the analysis, we found that the participants actively invoke their own emergent common ground and cooperate to overcome communication difficulties, and reveal the diachronic changes of core common ground in online and hybrid classes as class format evolved.

The third presentation will be shown the result of their research by Atsumi Yamaguchi (Osaka University/Meijo University) and Mugiho Kojima (Mie University) titled “Co-constructing new ordinariness in a hybrid mode of classroom communication: A dynamic participation framework in the post-pandemic era.” This presentation will showcase what and how a participation framework (Goffman, 1981) is co-constructed and what and how common ground (Clark, 1996) on a participating hybrid classroom is established in higher education. While experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, we established "new ordinariness" on communication as we adapted to and built common ground in the new modes of classroom. Previous studies (e.g., Ishiguro, 2020; Hata, 2022) reveal that all participants on online platforms equally experience dual spaces, including an actual space (such as homes and offices) and a virtual online space (such as video conference platforms). In the case of a hybrid classroom, on the other hand, Hata (2022) suggests that only remote participants experience an imbalanced participation and proposed distinct participation models, for face-to-face, online, and hybrid classes employing Kendon (1990)’s F-formation. However, the participation framework in hybrid communication is still under-researched. To fully understand the participation framework for hybrid classes, Hata’s model should be further investigated. Thus, in this presentation, we will explore 1) how participants in a hybrid classroom interact with each other in comparison to in-person and online classrooms; 2) how their interactions are analysed in an analytical lens of participation framework; and 3) how the ways they interact in certain participation statues can be explained in the notion of common ground. Along with Goffman (1981)’s participation framework which explains people’s participation status in interaction, this session employs multimodal analysis and discourse analytical tools. It will demonstrate the findings from an analysis of the videorecorded data of our doctorate seminars from 2019 to 2023 (pre-pandemic to post-pandemic). The audience will learn ways that the participation framework of a hybrid class is more complex due to the interactions placed in a characteristic formation across real and virtual spaces. First, the participants use particular types of verbal and nonverbal information, some of which are unique to hybrid communication. Second, in-person participants tend to be addressed more often whereas online participants tend to remain side-participants because of a special division between two spaces. Most importantly, in-person participants are likely to move their attention in and out the virtual space. In other words, we witnessed two different participation modes in the hybrid classroom: one with the conversation mainly placed in a real space among in-person participants, and one placed in a virtual space among all the participants including the online participants. The switch of these two modes was triggered by the in-person participants’ (especially the teacher’s) contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982) such as in-person participants addressing online participants, change of topic, eye gazes (to computer displays or to in-person participants), and facial expressions. Finally, we will suggest that these contextualization cues function as evidence that common ground in hybrid class participation has been established over the course of repeated grounding among the participants. We will end this session by proposing a revised model of participation framework for a hybrid classroom and implications for how online participants’ engagement can be enhanced.

The fourth and last presentation will be discussed by Ritsuko Izutani (Mukogawa Women's University) and Kaori Hata (Osaka University) titled “Considering Resilience in the New Classroom situation from ba Theory: A Case Study of Changes and Distortions in the Framework of Participation and Involvement in Face-to-Face, Online, and Hybrid Classes under the COVID-19 pandemic.” The first to third presentations employ common ground (Kecskes and Zhang 2009) and Tanaka (2019) to clarify the process to co-construct (emergent) common ground. The aim of this presentation is to follow and oversee these theories that have been used in the three previous presentations, and to deepen the discussion and consider them. In order to achieve this objective, this presentation draws on ba theory: in ba theory (Ide and Fujii 2020), they focus on the phenomenon of language practices in non-Western societies and proposes a new theory that contributes to an understanding of culture and communication. The process from the beginning to the end of communication proposed in this colloquium is a process of looking for how to find a common ground to be terminated by empathy, which does not require the formation of a consensus on the event in question. There are no communicative problems even if the topic deviates from the event that is currently being discussed, and people are willing to go off-topic in order to form empathy. This is a form of communication that is completely opposite to communication that is based on the proposition of 'expressing opinions, evaluating and judgments about events', and whose main proposition is to 'end up sympathising'. In this presentation, ba theory will be used to examine, from a cultural / social norm perspective, what the basic principles of 'empathic ending' communication are and why 'empathic ending' is a supreme proposition.