from Part I - Laying the Foundations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2025
This chapter focuses on why researchers and teachers who are involved in technology-enhanced language learning and teaching might find theoretical approaches useful and provides an overview of more established as well as emergent theories. In order to identify the more recent approaches used to conceptualize CALL today studies are reviewed from leading CALL journals. Key theories and approaches identified from studies were socioculturalism, mediated learning theory, activity theory, social presence, social justice education, maker culture, design thinking, rewilding, social semiotics/multimodality, multimodal interaction analysis, multiliteracies, geosemiotics, gesture studies, dual-coding theory, second language acquisition, dynamic systems theory, translanguaging, connectivism, willingness to communicate, self-determination, sports psychology, and identity and investment. The chapter demonstrates the increasing influence of concepts, theories, and methodologies that originate from other disciplines, resulting in “transdisciplinarity.” Many of the theories deployed highlight the transformative nature of language learning and teaching via an increasingly diverse range of tools and contexts, offering considerable scope for further methodological and pedagogical innovation.
This book significantly contributed to identifying and outlining the social turn in applied linguistics, specifically in the area of second-language acquisition. The author proposes an alternative approach to the input–interaction–output model, an approach that is informed by interdisciplinarity and a focus on the social.
Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen’s book lays out their multimodal theory of communication to a wider audience. It shows how people can make meaning in different ways, using different modes and media. This is particularly important in today’s communication environment, which offers a multitude of online resources for making meaning.
This book provides a useful overview of complexity theory in the context of applied linguistics. Focusing on the interaction between the language learner and his/her context, it is a particularly useful way of approaching the transformative impact of the digital media on the way we learn languages.
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