Synchronous online language teaching involves the simultaneous employment of a range of techno-semio-pedagogical competences (Guichon, 2012). Indeed, teacher-student interaction is made particularly dynamic due to the flexibility and versatility of digital tools and the Internet (Develotte & Drissi, 2013). Among the necessary professional skills and strategies for online synchronous teaching, this paper will focus on the specific dimensions of affective competence (Saarni, 1988 ; Mikolajczak, 2014) and the social need to maintain a climate of comfort during one-to-one online tutoring interactions (Denis, 2003 ; Quintin, 2008 ; Garrot-Lavoué et al., 2009 ; Dejean-Thircuir et al., 2010 ; Guichon & Tellier, 2017). In this paper, we focus on a particular social phenomenon that is strongly linked to emotions and their social regulation: face work (Goffman, 1955, 1967, 1973 ; Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987). Applied to CALL, our aim is to observe how this social practice is manifested in an interactional environment where the perception of the other is mediated by a videoconferencing platform.