Toward a new normal in foreign language classrooms

Although Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is relied upon heavily in these disruptive times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about committed learners’ reactions to CALL as they actively voiced their questions and concerns during crisis-prompted remote learning. Employing a qualitative research method, findings reveal that their attitudes toward remote learning were ambivalent. While they viewed online tools as useful learning resources, they also expressed hesitation in adopting them. Meanwhile, they welcomed innovative ad hoc curriculum quickly developed by the instructor; however, the innovative curriculum was also viewed as less organized. These findings shed light on pedagogical implications for world language education in higher education and urge researchers to further investigate how remote language teaching and learning would affect committed students during the new normal times as foreign language enrollments continue to decline.

Investigating Creativity in Online K-12 World Language Classrooms

This chapter outlines creativity in the world language classroom through the results of a mixed-methods study during the COVID-19 pandemic. While there has been a growing interest in creativity within education, little has been researched related to creative and uncreative factors in the language classroom, specifically in an online teaching context. For this reason, this research study explores creativity in the online world language K-12 classroom by examining teaching artifacts self-selected by K-12 language teachers, as well as interviews with interested participants. Findings suggest that creativity is multidimensional with creative factors overlapping within artifacts. Additionally, teachers have persisted throughout the pandemic to integrate creativity in order to engage students with the content in various ways, harness student attention, and give students choice. In addition, teachers have used various technologies to provide opportunities for students to work asynchronously and synchronously.

Empowering and Motivating Language Students in an Online Environment

This chapter explores pandemic-driven innovations in world language (WL) curriculum design and content delivery that encouraged student communication during remote learning. The study focused on questionnaire data from 49 WL instructors who identified specific pedagogical techniques acquired and honed during the COVID-19 pandemic, even amidst unprecedented hardships. Results indicated that WL instructors found most successful the types of activities which allowed for more timely feedback and student choice and built communicative skills for real-life situations. Furthermore, the instructors shared post-pandemic plans to employ more of these technological tools that fostered student collaboration and engagement, with a focus on building community and supporting social and emotional learning. Educators also emphasized deepened awareness regarding the myriad inequities among learners, the importance of establishing rapport with students, and the value of their own professional networks.

Core Practices for World Language Teaching in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This chapter presents the results of a nationwide questionnaire of world language teachers in the United States (n=135) that sought to examine how they perceived the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their ability to enact certain “core practices” for world language teaching. Quantitative analysis of Likert items and qualitative analysis of open-ended questions allowed for the examination of the teacher's perceptions of their practice related to three core practices that have been identified as essential to the work of contextualized, standards-based instruction. The findings contribute to an understanding of the realities of world language teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruptions created by it, and the challenges faced in carrying out the work of world language teaching. Given these insights, suggestions are made for ways forward for the work in core practices in world language teacher education, as well as for pedagogies for practice-based world language teacher education.

Language Teachers' Sense of Efficacy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 global pandemic quickly changed the educational landscape by adding challenges as teachers had to pivot almost immediately from traditional educational contexts to unfamiliar remote, online environments. In-service world language teachers (N = 497) were surveyed to understand differences in one's sense of efficacy teaching languages before and during the pandemic. Results show stark differences in both contexts. The findings provide manifold implications for world language teacher preparation as well as teacher retention and professional development.

Language Teaching in the Time of COVID-19

This chapter examines the experiences of world language (WL) teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time that required pedagogical pivots at all levels of the educational landscape. The objectives of this chapter are twofold: 1) to identify the main challenges encountered by WL teachers of different languages at distinct levels and with diverse teaching experience and 2) to highlight the successful practices these educators used to foster language learning during this disruptive time. To explore these goals, a phenomenological study was conducted with 27 WL teachers of Spanish, French, German, Chinese, or Russian in the K-16 context, including pre-service and experienced in-service educators. Thematic analyses of participants' responses for a semi-structured interview and survey revealed five salient themes related to their primary challenges and successes: engagement, community, comprehension, balance, and mental health. The lived experiences articulated by these WL educators have important pedagogical implications for (re)conceptualizing best practices in the future.

Active Discussion Approaches for the Synchronous Online World Language Classroom

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the context of world language teaching and learning around the globe in 2020 when schools unexpectedly switched to remote learning. In the face of this unanticipated shift, world language educators sought ways to adapt communicative language teaching to remote delivery. Active discussion approaches effectively encourage students to master course material and gain proficiency in synchronous online classes. This chapter discusses best practices for active discussions and offers examples for creating engaging discussion approaches for synchronous online world language classes.

It All Connects

The COVID-19 pandemic forced society to reevaluate the role of technology in the blink of an eye, and virtual learning environments became a necessity rather than an option. Even those instructors who were accustomed to remote learning had to reevaluate its best practices. World language teachers especially were forced to consider how to best provide their students the opportunity to practice the three modes of communication: interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational. With communication being the essence of foreign language instruction, it was of utmost consideration as to how it could transition effectively online. While there are many tools available for online teaching, not all of them are suitable for the world language class. Using connectivism as a framework, the authors propose that a single tool, Flipgrid, can be used to develop communicative proficiency and has the potential to enhance 21st century skills. This chapter will describe Flipgrid, its advantages and limitations, and offer three sample activities.

Unsupervised Embedding of Trajectories Captures the Latent Structure of Mobility

Human mobility drives major societal phenomena including epidemics, economies, and innovation. Historically, mobility was constrained by geographic distance, however, in the globalizing world, language, culture, and history are increasingly important. Here, we show a mathematical equivalence between word2vec model and the gravity model of mobility and demonstrate that, by using three human trajectory datasets, word2vec encodes nuanced relationships between locations into a systematic and meaningful vector-space, providing a functional distance between locations, as well as a representation for studying the many dimensions of mobility. Focusing on the case of scientific mobility, we show that embeddings implicitly learn cultural, linguistic, and hierarchical relationships at multiple levels of granularity. Connecting neural embeddings to the gravity model opens up new avenues for the study of mobility.