  Tandem telecollaboration is a pedagogy used in second language learning where
mixed groups of students meet online in videoconferencing sessions to practice
their conversational skills in their target language. We have built and
deployed a system called L2 Learning to support post-session review and
self-reflection on students participation in such meetings. We automatically
compute a metric called Conversational Volatility which quantifies the amount
of interaction among participants, indicating how dynamic or flat the
conversations were. Our analysis on more than 100 hours of video recordings
involving 28 of our students indicates that conversations do not get more
dynamic as meetings progress, that there is a wide variety of levels of
interaction across students and student groups, and the speaking in French
appears to have more animated conversations than speaking in English, though
the reasons for that are not clear.
