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Paper short abstract

Sign language teaching in virtual reality reveals how signs are remade under technological constraints. Using Goodwin’s co-operative action, we focus on how VR pedagogy is organized with transformed modalities and how “the sign” is co-constructed in interaction.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how French Sign Language (LSF) is remade through pedagogical transmission in a virtual reality (VR) adult classroom where the bodily and material conditions of signing become unstable. In the immersive platform VRChat, signing is produced through tracked hands and avatar animations, which constrain what can be articulated (e.g., missing or incomplete finger tracking, absent facial expressions). These constraints generate interactional conditions in which participants must actively reconstitute what counts as an LSF sign.

Drawing on video-ethnographic observations, we analyze how participants collaboratively maintain sign recognizability despite systematic transformations in handshape. A recurrent pedagogical issue is the existence of multiple VR-realizations of ‘the same’ sign, depending on controller type and avatar software. For example, when finger bending is unavailable, signers may first depict bending as a preparatory action, producing an accumulative transformation of an established form.

We foreground the ontological problem: the sign becomes an object-in-transformation whose identity is achieved interactionally/contextually, rather than being presupposed. Building on Goodwin’s Co-Operative Action Framework, we focus on how VR teaching/learning is organized. We complement this with Peircean sign classification to specify modalities of transformation: some shifts preserve iconic resemblance, while others rely on indexical anchoring.

We argue that VR LSF pedagogy involves the cultivation of interpretive methods for recognizing signs across altered forms. The classroom thus becomes a site where language is actively reconstituted through co-operative transformations, raising broader questions: what counts as “the sign” and how does the teachability of language depend on its capacity to travel across divergent materialities?