This paper describes tutoring practices of two different populations of online teachers: trainee tutors (second year students in the Master of Arts in Teaching French as a Foreign Language at the Université Lumière – Lyon 2) and experienced teachers based in different locations (France, Spain and Finland). They participated in a project using a desktop videoconferencing platform designed for delivering online language courses. They taught French as a Foreign Language to a group of students from UC Berkeley in 2010. The paper introduces the related research questions of instructional online practices in a synchronous environment: how the two populations of teachers introduce the learning tasks, and by which means the information is provided to the students. We will emphasize the role of different communication tools (written chat facility, oral chat facility and webcam) used by the two populations of tutors in order to convey the meaning of the task to be carried out. We discuss the qualitative findings of the study conducted on this multimodal corpus in order to highlight the semio-pedagogical competences of the two populations of online tutors.
