Learning through wonder: imprinting wonder in language learning for lifelong engagement

What is it? Motivation to learn starts with wonder and the breath of wonder transcending curiosity, which Piaget (1969) defined as the urge to explain the unexpected and Engel (2011) as the urge to know more. When wondering, learners express the desire to know what they do not know, as well as what they already know. In the modern languages curriculum, a language learner who uses ‘wonder’ is driven by curiosity for the language(s); has questions about the place and the people; has a wish to know more about various cultures; and eventually become a lifelong linguist. When we introduce learning design based on the pedagogy of wonder, we implement an approach that allows learners to become agents of their own learning by initiating the questioning themselves. L'Ecuyer (2014) defines the emotional response to this type of pedagogy as a possible consequence of wonder, rather than wonder as such.

Translanguaging: navegando entre lenguas – pedagogical translanguaging for multilingual classrooms

What is it? Most of the world population speaks two or more languages, which means many classrooms are intrinsically multilingual. In addition, education in more than one language is currently being promoted across the world, and there is an increasing interest in exploring how bilingual speakers are educated, reflecting “the shift from monolingual ideologies in the study of multilingual education to multilingual ideologies and dynamic views of multilingualism” (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020, p. 300). This change in interpreting multilingualism is supported by the emergence of concepts such as translanguaging. Nowadays, the term translanguaging is used in various contexts (for example, bilingual and multilingual education, English-medium instruction, or language teaching, including Content and Language Integrated Learning, or CLIL; see Cenoz & Gorter, 2020, pp. 305-306). Everyday or social translanguaging refers to how multilinguals tactically use their whole linguistic repertoire for communication purposes. Rather than indicating what languages are, translanguaging focuses on what multilingual speakers do with languages, which is to fluidly navigate across them. Therefore, the boundaries between languages become more diffused.

Digital storytelling: multimodal meaning making

What is it? Robin (n.d.) defines digital storytelling as “the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories”, stressing that “they all revolve around the idea of combining the art of telling stories with a variety of multimedia, including graphics, audio, video, and Web publishing” (n.p.). Ohler (2009) suggests that “digital storytelling […] uses personal digital technology to combine a number of media into a coherent narrative” (p. 15). Very often, digital storytelling involves some kind of video production (see examples on https://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu). Including stories and storytelling for language learning barely needs justification. The ability to tell a story is important in many life settings, from hanging out with friends to selling a product. But why digital storytelling? In 1996 The New London Group argued that the traditional perspective on literacy should be extended to encompass a broader range of meaning-making practices, including those involving digital media. In a similar vein, The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argues that “language learning is semiotic learning” (p. 27), and goes beyond the acquisition of words and structures. While engaging in digital storytelling, learners practise the target language in a potentially highly motivating context, use the target language and other linguistic resources to engage in discussion and negotiation about the process, and in the production of their stories (e.g. in a task-based language teaching tradition); also extending their repertoire of meaning-making resources through practice and reflection – cf. The New London Group’s (1996) notion of critical framing. Students of many different levels of proficiency can create engaging digital stories – from the A1-level primary school student telling a story via the Puppet Pals app, to the adult language learner engaging in a complex cross-media storytelling project.

Augmented reality learning: education in real-world contexts

What is it? Augmented Reality (AR) bridges the real and the digital. It is part of the Extended Reality (XR) spectrum of immersive technological interfaces. At one end of the continuum, Virtual Reality (VR) immerses users in fully digital simulations which effectively substitute for the real world. At the other end of the continuum, AR allows users to remain immersed in the real world while superimposing digital overlays on the world. The term mixed reality, meanwhile, is sometimes used as an alternative to AR and sometimes as an alternative to XR.

The linguistic landscape: enhancing multiliteracies through decoding signs in public spaces

What is it? The Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a relatively new field which draws from several disciplines such as applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural geography. According to Landry and Bourhis (1997), “the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” (p. 25). More recently, the type of signs that can be found in the public space has broadened to include the language on T-shirts, stamp machines, football banners, postcards, menus, products, tattoos, and graffiti. Despite this wider variety of signs, Landry and Bourhis’s (1997) definition still captures the essence of the LL, which is multimodal (signs combine visual, written, and sometimes audible data) and can also incorporate the use of multiple languages (multilingual).

Digital corpora: language teaching and learning in the age of big data

What is it? Using corpora to teach languages is nothing new and, while the term corpus linguistics hails from the 1940s, most language learning before the 20th century adopted a corpus approach – using a series of texts in the language under study as a type of corpus on which to base acquisition. With the advent of widespread computing in the latter half of the 20th century, corpora began to be digitised, rendering interrogation of large amounts of data a much simpler and more appealing prospect. Today, languages in all forms (written, spoken, performed, formal, informal, etc.) are captured all the time through online and digital platforms, apps, etc. meaning that the wealth of language data literally at our fingertips is enormous. This has triggered the development of appropriate tools to explore these vast data sets.

Foreword

The rich variety of innovative approaches to language learning represented here points to one of the main characteristics of the learning environment today, namely the ever-expanding choice in strategies and resources that fit particular contexts. The contributions in this collection are, in that sense, tremendously helpful as they lay out what the innovation is and how it is used, but also are forthright about both the benefits and potential issues. While many of the innovations discussed here involve the use of technology, we should keep in mind that the newest and greatest technologies are not necessarily those most compatible with pedagogical needs and best practices.

Action-oriented approaches: being at the heart of the action

What is it? An action-oriented approach views “users and learners of a language primarily as ‘social agents’, i.e. members of society who have tasks (not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field of action. While acts of speech occur within language activities, these activities form part of a wider social context, which alone is able to give them their full meaning” (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 9). As ‘social agents’, learners fully engage in meaningful real-life situations to which they learn to respond in a wholly cognitive and emotional manner, mobilizing their unique linguistic and sociocultural repertoires. Here, the notion of ‘task’ goes beyond the mere notion of a communicative activity to encompass the realization of projects or problems to be solved rooted in reality, socially, and culturally situated, through a set of targeted and concerted ‘social’ actions, ‘not exclusively language-related’, to achieve a clearly defined objective. Whether within the community in a community-based approach, or in the classroom, itself perceived as a mini-society with a social dimension (Puren, 2009), learners engage and collaborate with peers and others as they mobilize and acquire prior and new skills, knowledge, values, and know-how to solve real-life problems. Communication is not the goal, it is the means, along with critical thinking, self-reflection, creativity, and adaptability, to achieve the task...

Automatic speech recognition: can you understand me?

What is it? Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a digital communication method that transforms spoken discourse into written text. This rapidly evolving technology is used in email, text messaging, or live video captioning. Current ASR systems operate in conjunction with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to transform speech into text that people – and machines – can read. NLP refers to the methodologies and computational tools that analyze data produced in a natural language, such as English.

The translation turn: a communicative approach to translation in the language classroom

What is it? Translation, explicitly or implicitly, has been a constant presence in the teaching and learning of languages throughout the ages. It may therefore seem surprising that it should find a place in a report on innovative pedagogies. While translation has indeed been used for centuries for the purpose of language learning, there is no doubt that recent approaches in the area of language and translation pedagogy have helped re-conceptualise – and re-operationalise – translation in radically new ways. For decades, translation had been identified with the grammar translation method, and decried as incompatible with a communicative approach. In the last two decades, however, we have seen a thorough re-examination of the role of translation in language teaching and learning. A range of factors have contributed to this trend, among them, the questioning of the monolingual principle in language pedagogy, extensive developments in the area of audiovisual translation, exciting innovations in the field of professional translation didactics, the huge success of translation-based digital platforms such as Duolingo, and, crucially, the introduction of the notion of mediation in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR, 2001), later expanded in the Companion volume (CEFR, 2018).