What to Train

Learner training consists of the motivation and affective dimension and the knowledge and skill dimension (Garrison, Reference Garrison1997; Holec, Reference Holec, Kjisik, Voller, Aoki and Nakata2009). The affective dimension includes both learners’ intention to initiate the learning behavior (i.e. the entering motivation), and learners’ sustained interest in the behavioral intention (i.e. the maintenance of intention) (Garrison, Reference Garrison1997). This dimension targets the psychological aspect of technology use, which involves psychological preparation prior to the technological activity and motivational scaffold throughout the activity (Chotipaktanasook, Reference Chotipaktanasook2020). The goal of psychological preparation is to develop positive attitudes toward the technological activity (i.e. to help learners see the whys behind the action and internalize the necessity and value of the actions) and enhance perceived confidence of carrying out the technological activity (Hubbard, Reference Hubbard, Fotos and Browne2004; Lai, Reference Lai2018). The focus of the motivational scaffold is to maintain continued investment in the CALL activity by strengthening the intrinsic drive (e.g. catering to personal interest, providing choices, and making visible the accomplishment and progress) and/or building extrinsic motivational mechanisms (e.g. competition, award, and collaboration). Fostering an open mindset and the cognitive flexibility to deal with the uncertainties and complexity of interacting with technology is also deemed critical to maintaining learners’ continued interest in using technological resources, especially in self-directed learning beyond the classroom (Kop & Fournier, Reference Kop and Fournier2011). The key considerations of the psychological domain of learner training is to construct and facilitate learning experiences that satisfy the three basic psychological needs for autonomous motivation: (1) the need for autonomy (i.e. the need to be the initiator of actions and obtain psychological freedom); (2) the need for competence (i.e. the need to experience a sense of confidence and accomplishment to achieve desired goals); and (3) the need for relatedness (i.e. the need to have a close and positive relationship with others and experience a sense of belonging) (Deci & Ryan, Reference Deci and Ryan1985).

The knowledge and skill dimension focuses on developing and supporting four aspects of technology use: the technical aspect (i.e. the what aspect, general digital literacy and familiarity with language-specific functionality); the pedagogical aspect (i.e. the why aspect, the mapping of the learning objectives within the CALL activity); the strategic aspect (i.e. the how aspect, techniques that facilitate and enhance the learning process), and the contextual aspect (i.e. the where and when aspect, learning needs, experiences, and situations in relation to the CALL activity) (Chotipaktanasook, Reference Chotipaktanasook2020; Romeo & Hubbard, Reference Romeo, Hubbard, Levy, Blin, Siskin and Takeuchi2010). Supporting the four aspects of technology use involves both the resource component and the strategy component. Resources are multidimensional and include material resources (i.e. the online tools and platforms), mental resources (i.e. technological and social skills and knowledge), social resources (i.e. social ties and relationships), cultural and discursive resources (i.e. beliefs and shared mentalities related to behaviors), and temporal resources (i.e. time available for the behaviors) (Van Dijk, Reference Van Dijk2005). To obtain knowledge and skills related to the resource component, students need an understanding of the selection criteria for online resources and for the functional tools within the platform, of the affordances of different online resources’ varying pedagogical purposes, and of what a quality learning experience entails (Beckman, Bennett, & Lockyer, Reference Beckman, Bennett and Lockyer2014; Lai et al., Reference Lai, Hu and Lyu2018; Lai et al., Reference Lai, Liu, Hu, Benson and Lyu2022). Students also need social and emotional support from learning communities where they share resources obtained from various venues and ways to manage the resources (Ma, Reference Ma, Chapelle and Sauro2017). The strategy component includes various cognitive and metacognitive strategies (Giveh et al., Reference Giveh, Ghobadi and Zamani2018), both generic skills and the specific skills of using technology for language learning (Benson, Reference Benson2013; Hubbard, Reference Hubbard, Fotos and Browne2004; Lai, Reference Lai2013). Generic skills include the monitoring of various cognitive and metacognitive factors (goal setting, strategic planning, task appraisal, evaluation, and reflection), behavioral factors (effort management and help seeking), affective factors (self-efficacy, anxiety management), and environment factors (time and environment management, peer learning, management of online distractions and multitasking) for self-regulation at different phases of learning (Kirschner & De Bruyckere, Reference Kirschner and De Bruyckere2017; Littlejohn et al., Reference Littlejohn, Hood, Milligan and Mustain2016; Pintrich, Reference Pintrich2000). Generic skills also include digital and information literacy (Wineburg & McGrew, Reference Wineburg and McGrew2016). Language learning-specific strategies include the development of the metalanguage related to key issues and concepts about the nature and process of language learning, the ability to coordinate cognitive attention and resources and learning behaviors to achieve optimal language learning results, and the ability to view and interact with resources strategically to optimize incidental language learning (Hubbard, Reference Hubbard2013; Reinders & White, Reference Reinders, White and Harwood2010; White & Bown, Reference White and Bown2020). These skills could be developed through scaffolding mechanisms such as goal lists, templates and prompts, examples of strategy utilization, and reflective assessments with metacognitive questions and feedback (Bernacki, Aguilar, & Byrnes, Reference Bernacki, Aguilar, Byrnes, Dettori and Persico2011). The strategy component also includes relevant social and communication strategies for successful interaction and learning experience in CALL (Giveh et al., Reference Giveh, Ghobadi and Zamani2018; Lawrence, Reference Lawrence2013).

How to Train

Learner training could be integrated coherently into the design of individual CALL applications and activities. Scholars such as Chapelle (Reference Chapelle2001) regard having a positive impact on learners as an important consideration in the design of CALL platforms, and part of the positive impact is to give students opportunities to learn about language learning and use strategies. Cooker (Reference Cooker2010) further proposed that components of learner strategy training need to be incorporated into the design either as a coherent piece or as parallel modules to go with the self-access learning materials. Training can also be threaded throughout a CALL activity to safeguard smooth implementation and learning. Take Bikowski and Vithanage’s (Reference Bikowski and Vithanage2016) study on web-based collaborative writing as an example. The researchers built coherent learner training components into this CALL activity. They included a technical training component (e.g. familiarizing students with the critical features of the platform for collaborative writing and giving them opportunities to use the tools prior to the collaborative writing task) and a strategy training component (e.g. discussing ways of effective collaboration and group communication and guiding students to form individual goals on what collaborative skills they would like to personally develop during the task) prior to the collaborative writing task. During the collaborative writing task, they engaged students to keep individual e-journals or blogs to analyze their group works’ strengths and weaknesses and reflect on their individual contributions to the collaborative task. After the task, they further engaged students in collective reflections on interactional conflicts and the collaboration process. Thus, different training components can be organically integrated into a CALL activity to support its smooth implementation and boost the relevant skills and strategies among learners. In addition, learner training could also be designed as a standalone intervention. The intervention could be an add-on component to a language course. For instance, Luo (Reference Luo2020) incorporated a MOOC course on general learning techniques (strategies against procrastination and cramming, spaced repetitions, chunking tasks, etc.) into her Spanish classes to enhance students’ self-directed Spanish learning. The embedded training could also focus on language-specific cognitive and metacognitive strategies. For instance, Zenotz (Reference Zenotz2012) integrated a four-session training program on online reading strategies into undergraduate reading classes. In Lai, Shum and Tian’s (Reference Lai, Shum and Tian2016) study, a twelve-week online training program on pedagogical rationales, resource selection strategies, and tactics for effective use of technological resources for out-of-class language learning with technological resources was organized around the development of a self-regulation feedback loop of forethought, performance, and reflection and operationalized as homework for students to study on their own. Similarly, Romeo and Hubbard (Reference Romeo, Hubbard, Levy, Blin, Siskin and Takeuchi2010) adopted the format of independent student projects plus regular in-class collaborative debriefing and biweekly consultation meetings with the instructor to embed learner training as a parallel component of the course. Moreover, standalone learner training could also be achieved through language advising, where individualized, co-constructed one-on-one reflective dialogues based on learners’ goals, interests, and situations are used to support learners’ out-of-class exploration with technological resources for language learning and challenge their existing beliefs about language learning to transform them into “highly-aware learners” who can self-advise in the learning process (Kato & Mynard, Reference Kato and Mynard2016).

Techniques such as experiential learning, goal-oriented learning, reflective activities (e.g. journals, self-assessment checklists) and cooperative learning (e.g. collaborative debriefing; online communities) are commonly interweaved in various pedagogical frameworks to operationalize learner training (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, Reference Dabbagh and Kitsantas2012; Giveh et al., Reference Giveh, Ghobadi and Zamani2018; Holec, Reference Holec, Kjisik, Voller, Aoki and Nakata2009). Take Reinders’s (Reference Reinders2010) pedagogical framework as an example. This framework starts by identifying a learning need and setting goals and planning learning to satisfy the need, which is then followed by selecting relevant resources and learning strategies and practicing the strategies in specific tasks and monitoring the strategy through teacher and peer feedback. The framework ends with assessment and revision. Constant reflection, pair or group work, and sharing sessions are threaded throughout the whole cycle to provide cognitive and affective support to students. In the meantime, scholars have also generated some general principles for the development of learner training. To enhance students’ interaction with individual CALL platforms/applications, Hubbard (Reference Hubbard, Fotos and Browne2004) proposed a set of five principles of learner training. These principles are: (1) experience CALL yourself, where teachers are expected to get first-hand experience with language learning with technology in the role of students so as to achieve a better understanding of the type of support students need in the process; (2) give learners teacher training where teachers guide students to develop a reasoned understanding of what the process of language learning involves, help students link learning objectives with specific technological experiences, and guide them to plan the CALL activities; (3) use a cyclic approach, which segments training into small junctures to focus on during each training session and engages learners to experience the CALL activity first before providing detailed training; (4) use collaborative debriefings where students get together to share and reflect collectively on their experience and strategies; and (5) teach general exploitation strategies, where teachers guide students to transfer the CALL experience to other learning situations. Expanding the discussion beyond individual CALL platforms/resources, White and Bown (Reference White and Bown2020) proposed an informed consumer approach that aims at helping language learners to become informed consumers who play a proactive role in navigating and constructing a personalized language learning ecology. The informed consumer approach emphasizes developing the framework and metalanguage of optimal language learning, immersing students in experimentation with different resources and choices, engaging students in critical evaluation of the different language learning choices and opportunities in view of the framework and metalanguage of language learning, and helping students to make connections across experiences to achieve a coordinated view. Thus, in this learning context, providing learners with the opportunities for experimentation followed by critical analysis to identify CALL experiences that add value to one’s existing learning is essential.

Interculturality in Education

Since the start of the twenty-first century, scholars in the field of applied linguistics and language education have increasingly shifted their understandings of language in terms of system, cognition, and form to focus on the idea of language as a practice “to explain how communication works in contact zones” (Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah2013, p. 27). Language, through this lens of practice, is understood as dynamic, emergent, fluid, flexible, and contingent (Choi & Ollerhead, Reference Choi and Ollerhead2018; García & Kleyn, Reference García, Kleyn, García and Kleyn2016). Such understandings have opened up rich insights into the complexities of multilingual and intercultural communication in, as mentioned earlier, “contact zones” (Pratt, Reference Pratt, Bartholomae and Petrosky2002), where languages and cultures come together, often in contexts of conflict and misunderstanding, characterized by unequal power relationships. Just as languages are thought to be emergent in interactions, scholars in fields such as intercultural communication and education also conceive of the notion of culture as produced through intercultural exchanges. Following Dervin (Reference Dervin2016) we use the term interculturality with “the suffix -ality, which translates as a ‘something in the making’ rather than ‘the adjective-turned-into-a-noun the intercultural’” (p. 1) in order to avoid falling into the trap of understanding this dynamic point of view in static or prescribed ways.

The term “intercultural competence” can be contentious as competence not only suggests an end point (a level of mastery) but also suggests that teacher educators, or certain groups of people, have the knowledge and skills that can make students competent. In an increasingly complex, cosmopolitan world created through transcultural flows (Pennycook, Reference Pennycook2007), complex intersectionalities (Block & Corona, Reference Block, Corona and Preece2016), and where “flows of information, media symbols and images, and political and cultural ideas are constant and relentless” (Rizvy, Reference Rizvy2009, p. 265), we cannot pass on a foolproof toolkit that will guarantee success in future scenarios. Intercultural (or cosmopolitan) learning is not, as Global Studies in Education scholar Fazal Rizvy (Reference Rizvy2009) states, so much about “imparting knowledge and developing attitudes and skills for understanding other cultures per se, but … [about] helping students examine the ways in which global processes are creating conditions of economic and cultural exchange that are transforming our identities and communities” (p. 266). Similarly, in relation to students learning about interculturality in educational contexts, Dervin (Reference Dervin2016) also suggests “in a world where racism, different kinds of discrimination, and injustice are on the rise, time spent at school should contribute effectively to prepare students to be real interculturalists who can question these phenomena and act critically, ethically and responsively” (p. 2). Summarizing Dervin’s perspective of interculturality, Holliday (Reference Holliday and Jackson2012) states, and we concur, that interculturality is best understood as “a reflexive and uncertain digging beneath the surface of discourses and politics – as an elusive quality to be searched for and researched rather than to be achieved as a result of staged intercultural learning” (p. 46).

Drawing on digital media created in and for the Australian context by one of the authors (Loban) of this chapter, we aim to show how such dimensions of interculturality can be manifested in contexts of teaching and learning through the creation and playing of Indigenous cultural games. In keeping with the critical indigenous research methodologies (CIRM) framework (Brayboy et al., Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012), which comprises the concepts of “relationality,” “responsibility,” “respect,” and “reciprocity,” that Loban draws on in designing an Indigenous cultural game (Loban, Reference Loban2021b), we hope to show the possibilities and challenges of opening up intercultural exchange and understanding through digital technology.

To contextualize these ideas, in the next section we outline how intercultural understanding is understood in the Australian curriculum. Then, we explain the four R’s of CIRM, drawing on Brayboy et al.’s (Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012) explanations, and how these concepts not only bring into creation interculturally produced digital media that students can engage with, but are also exceptional exemplars of digital media that engage students in developing their own intercultural understandings through exploration and discussion with educators and peers. While the examples we describe in the “current research and practice” section have been designed by Loban, an expert digital media designer, we believe that the cultural design approaches outlined below can apply to the designing of intercultural pedagogical tasks that may or may not involve digital technology. Furthermore, given that many schools and other educational institutions around the world are already placing great emphasis on providing students with skills to create their own digital resources, a focus on design is neither far-off nor far-fetched.

Intercultural Understanding in the Australian Curriculum as Viewed through the CIRM Framework

As Australia becomes more culturally and linguistically diverse, the development of intercultural understanding, defined in the Australian Curriculum as the “development of skills, behaviours and dispositions as well as drawing on students’ growing knowledge, understanding and critical awareness of their own and others’ cultural perspectives” (ACARA, 2021), is an important general capability of all students (and teachers). This capability consists of three interrelated elements, “recognizing culture and developing respect,” “interacting and empathizing with others,” and “reflecting on intercultural experiences and taking responsibility” (ACARA, 2021). While such elements may seem reasonable enough, when we apply the lens of the four Rs, relationality, responsibility, respect, and reciprocity, of the CIRM framework, we begin to see a static and essentialist conception of “culture” and “difference” scholars warn us against. We outline a brief explanation of the four Rs below.

The Four Rs

“Relationality” refers to knowledge not owned by an individual or based on objective truths. The production of knowledge is relational and subjective. Researchers are encouraged to “be who they are while engaged actively as participants in the research process that creates new knowledge and transforms who they are and where they are” (Weber-Pillwax, Reference Weber-Pillwax2001, p. 174). With a strong emphasis on the process of relationship-building, researchers start their work with cultural protocols for conducting research. These are

“Responsibility” refers to the need to think about how researchers’ actions, decisions, and roles have long-term effects on those involved in the research which may include human and nonhuman entities such as people, animals, and places, as well as the ideas that are part of the research process. Which ideas and, how ideas are produced, and what consequences these ideas have on the lives and spaces involved matter greatly. Mutual and ongoing “respect” lies at the core of building relationships and is conceived as emerging from engaging in relationships and responsibilities. The last element, “reciprocity,” denotes researchers’ efforts to “pay it forward” by giving back to those involved in the research so that all those involved may continue to survive and thrive (Brayboy et al., Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012).

Deconstructing “Intercultural Understanding” through a CIRM Lens

In “recognizing culture and developing respect,” the first element of the Australian Curriculum’s Intercultural Understanding framework, the notion of “culture” denotes a given, pre-established and bounded object that is out there for us to step into. Students are expected to “recognise and appreciate differences between people and respect another person’s point of view” (ACARA, 2021). The development of respect is not presented as an emergent process that happens through the ongoing care and responsibilities we have as we gradually build our relationships. In “interacting and empathizing with others,” the second element of the framework, students “imagin[e] what it might be like to “walk in another’s shoes” and identify with others’ feelings, situations and motivations” (ACARA, 2021). There is little description here that reflects a relational process in developing mutual empathy and respect for each other, but a process we step into prepared to empathize with others/the Other through our interactions. The boundaries between the self and others are distinctly drawn. Finally, the ready-made notion of culture as something “out there” marked with boundaries between self and other, and an omission of a relational understanding are reflected in the final element, “reflecting on intercultural experiences and taking responsibility.” In this element, “students use reflection to better understand the actions of individuals and groups in specific situations and how these are shaped by culture. They are encouraged to reflect on their own behaviours and responses to intercultural encounters and to identify cultural influences that may have contributed to these” (ACARA, 2021).

There is no sense of dialogue, consultation, or collaboration here. Furthermore, where “responsibility” is concerned, the curriculum states: “Students learn to ‘stand between cultures,’ reconcile differing cultural values and perspectives and take responsibility for their own behaviours and their interactions with others within and across cultures” (ACARA, 2021). Responsibility is centered on one’s behaviors without an understanding of the relational nature in which ideas are generated by certain ways of thinking, knowing, being, and becoming that have real and long-lasting consequences in different communities.

“Intercultural understanding,” seen through this lens, is thus “predicated on essentialist conceptions of culture, rather than within a pedagogically open framework that explores the dynamics of cultural interactions in an ongoing fashion” which according to Rizvy (Reference Rizvy2009) renders any amount of intercultural education as unhelpful (p. 267). A divisional understanding of self/other (or Self/Other) is a long way away from coming to understand this thing called “culture” as something invented, made up in the dynamic processes of our intercultural relations, and ontologically connected to human and non-human entities. The “backwards and forwards, deep-digging and indeed political process [that] contributes to a deCentred interculturality that finds Self in Other and Other in Self as implied by Dervin (Reference Dervin2016)” (Holliday, Reference Holliday, Kumar and WelikalaT2021, p. 194) requires new ways of learning about interculturality.

In the following section, we outline four cultural design approaches to show how interculturality underpinned by the overall values or virtues in the four Rs can be experienced through digital media (see also Loban, Reference Loban2021a for an extended discussion on the relationship between his creations and the four Rs).

Cultural Design Approaches and Digital Media Exemplars for Experiencing Interculturality

There are several approaches to cultural design of digital media and these approaches will vary depending on the media and the type of cultural story and content educators want to communicate. Approaches may vary depending on educators’ own position in relation to the culture and their access to the culture of a particular community. In this chapter, we examine four pieces of cultural digital media created by one of the authors (Loban, the media creator) and identify several different cultural design approaches during the development of the digital media. The media creator grouped these cultural design processes into four categories: a shared cultural design approach, a personal cultural design approach, a community cultural design approach, and an external cultural design approach.

Shared Cultural Design Approach

In a shared cultural design approach, the content creator draws upon shared knowledge from their home environment, nation, country, or place to inform the cultural design and content of the digital media. There have been academic discussions about shared cultural identities, heritage, and histories that are sometimes in dispute (Chong, Reference Chong2012; Hall, Reference Hall2020; Van Gorp & Renes, Reference Van Gorp and Renes2007) within communities. Nonetheless, this cultural design approach has the utility to communicate the broad and shared knowledge of a culture to an audience. This knowledge could include historical cultural stories, or modern-day cultural practices, and this knowledge may differ from person to person. However, the knowledge remains as distinctly shared cultural knowledge of a people.

An example of a shared cultural design approach is illustrated in the development of a digital escape room based on Torres Strait stories the creator learned from childhood into adulthood. The escape room communicates elements of cultural stories appreciated and shared within the Torres Strait community. In this cultural reimagined story, the players encounter a Dogai (Gela, Reference Gela1993; Lawrie, Reference Lawrie1970), a typically malevolent shapeshifting spirit who takes one’s place in the island world and banishes the player to an underwater cavern. The player must escape by approaching various denizens of the cavern and obtain passwords from them by completing tasks related to Torres Strait knowledge. Embedded in these different tasks is knowledge related to astronomy, geography, and stories that are shared by the Torres Strait community. Each task leveraged Google Forms as a way for students to input their answers, which provided a password to progress to the next task (Figure 19.1 provides an example of a story task and related questions). In this instance, the shared cultural design process focuses on a group or region, that is, the Torres Straits, and communicates knowledge that is shared among Torres Strait Islanders.

Figure 19.1 Example of a set of tasks the student needs to solve before obtaining the password to access the next set of tasks. In this task, students are required to examine and familiarize themselves with the Torres Strait story of Gelam in order to answer the task questions.

This instance of digital media heavily emphasizes “Relationality” of knowledge as that which is shared among Torres Straits Islanders rather than belonging to any one Torres Strait person (Brayboy et al., Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012). These stories are constantly evolving and, with “responsibility” and “respect” to the shared community knowledge, such stories and knowledge can be expressed through various contemporary media including art, song, dance, and now digital media.

Personal Cultural Design Approach

Shared culture differs from personal cultural knowledge, which is more specific to individuals or families within a cultural context. In a personal cultural design approach, the content creator draws upon personal and familial stories, experiences, and understandings to inform the design of the digital media. Individual stories and experiences have often been used as a method in the past to communicate one’s culture and history (Cohen, Reference Cohen2004; De Leeuw & Rydin, Reference De Leeuw and Rydin2007). The personal cultural design approach has potential to add considerable value to the cultural content of media as the content is the real-life experience of culture in context and in action.

An example of a personal cultural design approach would be a video that the creator developed for an Indigenous Education class, where there was a module on using food to teach Indigenous culture and history. In the module, there were videos of cooking traditional Torres Strait dishes and an explanation of their history and cultural significance. The creator included dishes that had cultural aspects that were personally relevant and important to him. One such video explained the family dish of Torres Strait Semur, which is a type of traditional beef stew. The creator shared this personal cultural understanding with his students through a YouTube channel called Yumi Place (www.youtube.com/channel/UC29ovEcJDKKFreb9-oltyPw). The content is publicly available so students can access it later as a teaching resource (Figure 19.2 shows a screenshot of the Torres Strait Semur video). The video discusses how the Semur dish is not solely a Torres Strait Islander dish, but also an Indonesian dish that was brought to the Torres Straits by Indonesian migrants. The video discusses how these migrants did not always come to the Torres Straits voluntarily, as the creator’s own Great Dato (grandfather) was kidnapped at a young age, brought to the Torres Straits (Gaffney, Reference Gaffney1989), and forced into indentured labor, which was an enslavement practice that existed during that time in Northern Australia. The video communicates that the island creator’s Great Dato was from Banda Neira in the Banda Islands, where many of the world’s spices such as nutmeg and cloves are predominantly found (Jordan, Reference Jordan2016; Villiers, Reference Villiers1981). The influences of these ingredients are seen in Torres Strait cooking and even more specifically within the creator’s family Semur recipe. This personal story communicates culture through an individual’s own experiences and connection to family, community, and place. It discusses one family’s culture and personal history, and how Torres Strait culture has been informed and shaped by personal stories and interactions.

Figure 19.2 Screenshot of the Torres Strait Semur video showing the creator’s family’s finished Semur dish.

During the development of the video, “relationality” formed a significant part of the personal cultural design approach as the knowledge is shared among family. This relates to how such personal knowledge and stories interact with and contribute to the wider cultural community (Brayboy et al., Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012). “Responsibility” and “respect” to one’s family and familial knowledge also play a significant role in what and how such personal knowledge and stories can be shared. “Reciprocity” is also required to care for and acknowledge, where appropriate, personal and familial knowledge holders. This story also decenters the Eurocentric focus of Australian history and focuses on Indigenous–Asian cultural interactions and the formation of new cultural knowledge and identities.

Community Cultural Design Approach

A community cultural design approach focuses on developing media in partnership with the community and respected members and asks for their input and feedback to help shape the content. This type of community-based process is typical in many Indigenous communities, such as in the Torres Straits, where protocols often involve extended discussion to arrive at a community consensus and decision. This process can be applied to the cultural design of digital media to help inspire new directions, add greater authenticity, and validate present content.

An example of a community cultural design approach occurred during the development of the game Torres Strait Virtual Reality (TSVR), a project led by the media creator. Torres Strait Virtual Reality embedded Torres Strait Islander culture and knowledge into a virtual reality environment (Figure 19.3 shows an in-game screenshot of TSVR). During the game design and development process, an elder was heavily involved in the project, helping determine the game’s storyline, content, and overall design. In addition, playtests were carried out with various individuals and organizations representing the Indigenous Australian community, who provided cultural and technical feedback to the project team. This process synchronizes well with player-centered design in digital media (Ermi & Mäyrä, Reference Ermi and Mäyrä2005; Salen, Tekinbaş, & Zimmerman, Reference Salen, Tekinbaş and Zimmerman2004) as the process fulfills both playtesting requirements and cultural protocol requirements through a series of iterative inputs from the community to help shape a piece of digital media.

Figure 19.3 A screenshot of Torres Strait Virtual Reality showing Baidam the Shark, a constellation in the northern sky.

Throughout the development process of TSVR, the game design unwittingly aligned with CIRM (Brayboy et al., Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012). “Relationality” was reflected by engaging a Torres Strait elder and the community in the project to help shape the design and end product. “Respect” was the care taken in how Torres Strait culture was represented through the game and “responsibility” was required to follow cultural protocols and ensure a more culturally sound media product. “Reciprocity” manifested in general ways such as compensating the elder for his knowledge and time and volunteering in various university programs to display the game. The author also tried to use the game to promote and advocate for Torres Strait Islander culture and perspectives.

External Cultural Design Approach

An external cultural design approach involves a person outside the culture undertaking research and learning experiences in order to develop cultural media. This cultural design process focuses not on any personal, shared, or community approach, but rather from the perspective of a creator attempting to understand and learn about a culture, people, or place from an external perspective. Being an outsider means there are complexities and difficulties that need to be understood to respectfully embed culture in a piece of digital media. To strive toward the minimization of issues, the external cultural design approach draws strongly on the learning from the country model in cultural education (Harrison & Sellwood, Reference Harrison and Sellwood2016; Harrison & Skrebneva, Reference Harrison and Skrebneva2020; Harrison et al., Reference Harrison, Bodkin, Bodkin-Andrews and Mackinlay2017). Learning from country involves actively discovering new knowledge from the people and environment as opposed to solely learning from other media or texts. This approach puts into practice culture as ongoing and ever-present interactions and experiences between peoples and environments. Researchers are able to use other textual and digital media to inform their own media, but the cultural content in the digital media is made stronger and supported with firsthand experiences and interactions with the people and their environment. Tools such as the Selecting and evaluating resources document (Queensland Studies Authority, 2007) can be used to assess the appropriateness of nonexperiential sources if they need to be used in research. Ideally, with enough community engagement and amplification of cultural knowledge holders’ voices, the external cultural design approach fencompasses elements of a community cultural design approach.

An example of an external cultural design approach occurred during the creator’s development of an interactive 360-degree environment of the Macquarie University bush garden to communicate the role of bush gardens and plants in some Aboriginal communities. The creator, who is not Aboriginal, supplemented his internet and textbook research by undertaking tours of the Sydney Botanical Gardens and the Macquarie University bush gardens and visiting an Indigenous plant nursery. Additionally, the creator independently explored the Macquarie University bush garden, learning from sensory engagement with the plants, and information boards about the plants as well as the Macquarie University bush garden website. Based on his learning from country and external research, he created an example of an interactive 360-degree environment of the Macquarie University bush garden using the 360-degree tour builder Thinglink (www.thinglink.com/). The 360-degree environment shows a 360-degree picture of the university bush gardens and highlights points of interest with further 2D pictures and explanations of the plants with their traditional Aboriginal uses, as either medicine or food. The example 360-degree environment was then used by the students as an inspiration and a guide to create their own interactive 360-degree environment. The interactive media development involved students finding a local place of Indigenous significance, performing their research on their chosen place, visiting their chosen place, and learning from the experiences and research on their chosen place. This exercise encouraged students to learn about their local area from historical and contemporary perspectives, especially concerning local Indigenous cultures.

Students ideally undergo a cultural experiential learning process with the produced digital media a demonstration of their cultural experience and insight. This learning and media production process has also been found to produce valuable learning outcomes with students researching and inserting their own historical analysis into a video game through the process of modding (or modifying) a game (Loban, Reference Loban2021a). At the end of the process, students will have produced a media product, and, in educational contexts, the media can be used to potentially assess their cultural knowledge and experiences.

Given the researcher and content creator is external to the culture in question, CIRM is highly important and needs to be deeply embedded in an external cultural design approach (Brayboy et al., Reference Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, Solyom, Lapan, Quartaroli and Riemer2012). Understanding one’s “relationality” and one’s relationships to such cultural knowledge is pivotal to show respect to the culture and the custodians of the cultural knowledge. Additionally, it is important for creators to explain their process for engaging with the culture where possible. “Responsibility” and “respect” to the culture in question are necessary to authentically engage and represent the culture through digital media as an outsider. Media creators can embody “reciprocity” in their project by giving back to the culture and community where cultural knowledge holders are sharing their knowledge and time.

Varied Cultural Design Approaches

In summary, each cultural design approach provides very different takes on the development of digital media. A shared cultural design approach can be used to embed broad shared understandings of a culture into a medium, while a personal cultural design approach can be used to help communicate personal cultural stories and experiences through digital media. A community cultural design approach aligns with common Indigenous cultural protocols around consensus and leverages the community to help develop and shape a piece of media. An external cultural design approach allows those who are not from a given culture or do not have access to a community, to supplement their design approach with real experiences and interactions with a culture and its people. These different cultural design approaches are not mutually exclusive and often a piece of digital media can include a combination of these approaches to achieve a culturally sound digital media output.

Limitations

One limitation of the cultural design approaches to digital media is that prior knowledge of media development or learning on the job how to develop digital media is required to gain the full learning benefits. This extra requirement could shift the focus away from the cultural learning experience for some students. This shift may require the media developer first to learn the needed digital skillset to learn efficiently about culture through media development. This issue also applies if the creator wishes to develop polished media to communicate their knowledge of the culture effectively. However, this issue may vary from medium to medium, with some media development requiring little time investment while other media are more intensive. Moreover, there are often guides, instructions, and online support for those developing the media in question. These digital skills requirements are similar to the requirement for skills to express one’s knowledge, whether writing, speaking, performance, or any other form of expression. It should also be noted that this chapter only examined four pieces of media with distinct approaches. There may be different cultural design approaches when representing culture through digital media.

Metaphors of Technology Use

A number of metaphors have been applied to thinking about technology in language learning and teaching. Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has traditionally framed the use of computers as tutor, tool, or medium (Kern, Reference Kern2006; Levy, Reference Levy1997), each with its respective implications for the role of the teacher and the learner.

The tutor role suggests the computer is simulating a teacher in some way, providing instruction, practice, feedback, and assessment. One example would be language learning apps such as DuoLingo, Babbel, Pimsleur, or Rosetta Stone. The usual presumption is that learners use such applications autonomously, self-pacing their learning.

The tool role suggests provision of resources to the learner, who may be studying the language with a teacher or learning independently. These resources might include reference materials such as online dictionaries, grammars, concordances, or translation sites, or sources of cultural content such as news media, films and videos, radio and television broadcasts, special interest websites, blogs, podcasts, advertisements, songs, performances, speeches, and so on. Although such resources can be used independently by learners, a teacher’s guidance can clarify how such resources can be used to optimize language learning.

The medium role frames the digital device as a channel of communication through which the learner can interact with other speakers of the language (whether they are other learners or native speakers). This would include social media, email, texting, videoconferencing, and discussion forums.

Because some uses of technology might involve several of these qualities, however, a fourth, ecological metaphor is useful. For example, online gaming, and some of the classic technology-based language learning projects, such as À la rencontre de Philippe, Dans un quartier de Paris, and Cultura (Furstenberg & Levet, Reference Furstenberg and Levet1999, Reference Furstenberg, Levet and Chun2014; Furstenberg et al., Reference Furstenberg, Murray, Malone and Farman-Farmaian1993), integrate elements of tutor, tool, and medium roles all within an immersive environment. The ecology metaphor – because it focuses specifically on relationships between learners and their environments (including nonhuman artifacts such as computers) – has become particularly appealing as multimodal technology has evolved (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, Reference Cope and Kalantzis2017; Thoms & Poole, Reference Thoms and Poole2017).

Multiliteracies and Design of Meaning

Ideas from the New London Group’s (1996) manifesto on multiliteracies have been developed by many scholars over the years, but especially through the work of Cope and Kalantzis (e.g. Reference Cope and Kalantzis2000, Reference Cope and Kalantzis2009) and Kress (e.g. Reference Kress2003, Reference Kress2010), advocating a perspective expanding beyond linguistics to semiotics. Particularly important is the shift in perspective from static notions of competence and acquisition tied to a primarily linguistic focus on form to a more dynamic notion of design associated with a semiotic focus on the conjunction of form-and-meaning (Kress, Reference Kress2003, p. 40). Design of meaning is about people’s creative monitoring of how they use existing resources to redesign activities in the very act of performing them (for example, learning to compose a digital story in a new language and culture, which can lead to new insights about the genre as well as the culture). Design implies the possibility of choice among options, which accounts for styles of designing meaning (Kress, Reference Kress2010, p. 28).

Multiplicity of literacies means that no one is ever literate in all possible ways. Sharing and commenting on images in Instagram or Flickr involves a different set of knowledge, skills, and practices than designing a personal website or composing a digital story or transforming one’s image on TikTok. In the realm of electronic writing, writing an email, a text message, or a tweet each involve unique genre constraints, and their compositional features will vary widely with the intended audience and purpose. Teachers can help their students to become consciously aware of the constraints and freedoms they have to work with.

The multiliteracies movement in education has echoed other poststructuralist trends within the language teaching profession. For example, some programs have moved away from normative native speaker models toward translingual and transcultural models, embracing notions such as translanguaging (Garcia & Wei, Reference Garcia and Wei2014) and new notions of competence, such as intercultural competence (Liddicoat & Scarino, Reference Liddicoat and Scarino2013) and symbolic competence (Kramsch, Reference Kramsch2020). At the same time (and especially during pandemic remote instruction), teachers have increasingly designed learning activities that foster students’ autonomy and agency. Using the language outside the classroom is an increasingly important goal, and many programs offer opportunities for community participation in the target language, whether through internships, study abroad, or engaged scholarship experiences (Barili & Byram, Reference Barili and Byram2021). With respect to teaching with technology, this means that technology is used to expose learners to language varieties that are beyond their routine experience, to connect with other users of the language (whether native speakers or not) to learn about and from them, to reflect on how the foreign culture is represented in various ways in different online environments, and to create multimodal representations of what they are learning.

Cultural Dimensions of Technology

As symbolic systems, digital technologies must represent themselves – via an interface – to people in ways that people can understand (Johnson, Reference Johnson1997). Technologies are therefore not just a matter of hardware and media; they are intrinsically bound to culturally embedded attitudes, beliefs, practices, and expectations that vary across different parts of the world (Bell, Reference Bell2006). Moreover, just as the affordances of digital technologies get taken up differently by different cultural groups, so do digital technologies inspire new configurations of sociality, new ways of constructing identities, and new frames for making sense of the world. Consider, for example, how “profiles,” “status updates,” and “tweets,” and notions of “friends” and “followers” have transformed how we represent ourselves and relate to others in social media environments. In other words, technology is a part of culture, and culture is a part of technology.

Most research on using technology in language education naturally focuses on how computers (or other digital devices) might improve language and intercultural communication skills.Footnote ¹ Three areas of substantial impact have been learners’ ability to (1) develop their agency/autonomy and to express their identities, (2) develop their creativity in new ways, and (3) interact in new ways with other speakers of the language (Kern, Reference Kern2021). One area that deserves more attention than it has received is the symbolic and mediational dimensions of digital technologies and how they affect meaning making in online environments (Kern, Reference Kern2015). We can easily access cultural artifacts (text, music, video, films, etc.) from around the world, but how does the digital mediatization of these artifacts affect the interpretations and representations that we develop from them? Similarly, when we communicate via videoconference or text with speakers of a language, how does that technological mediation affect our representations of one another (Kern & Develotte, Reference Kern and Develotte2018)? What might language learners need to learn about the supranational culture of the internet (and its genres) in addition to the culture(s) and genres of the language they are learning? From this viewpoint, literacy in technology-mediated learning environments introduces the need for new kinds of critical thinking, focused, for example, on the biases inherent in the structural features of a given medium (e.g. PowerPoint, social media sites, smartphone keypad, autocorrect), making one goal of teaching to sensitize students to the various logics at play in texts and textual production (e.g. image, speech, writing, music) and to help them see how these logics affect meaning (Kress, Reference Kress2003). These kinds of critical reflection cannot be expected to develop spontaneously but rather benefit tremendously from teachers’ guidance.

We will now consider several areas where teachers play a key role in the development of their students’ language and literacy abilities via technology.

Autonomy

Language learners can find a plethora of reference materials, tutorials, news, music, videos, films, and other cultural products on the internet. However, they often gravitate to the first sources they find, and this is where teachers can provide an important guiding hand, giving them suggestions about truly helpful dictionaries and instructional videos, orientating them to the political stances of popular news sources, giving tips on doing effective online searches. A particularly important role teachers can play is structuring opportunities for their students to engage with other speakers of the language through social media, forums, and telecollaborative exchanges, and then discussing those communication experiences with their students to highlight moments of intercultural significance. Stockwell and Reinders (Reference Stockwell and Reinders2019) point out that technology doesn’t make learners autonomous, but when learners who already have some degree of autonomy realize what they can do with technology, they can be motivated to work independently (and this is where teacher guidance is important).

Mobility

The interlinking of portable digital devices (smartphones, tablets, watches, glasses, and other forms of wearable technology) – together with location services that allow a device to “know” where it is – make possible immersive augmented reality (AR) environments as well as interaction with social robots. Augmented reality creates the possibility of annotating real-life objects with sound, text, images, and animations (as in viewing a restaurant menu through a smartphone lens and seeing the text translated into one’s native language, or viewing a painting in a museum and activating an audio narrative as well as superimposed visual markers or images of other paintings by the same artist for comparison). Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) can be used to supplement classroom learning by cutting across boundaries of formal and informal learning opportunities both in and out of school. Hellermann and Thorne (Reference Hellermann and Thorne2022), for example, describe students’ language use (and embodied actions) in a mobile AR language learning activity involving digital maps and a series of observational and problem-solving tasks using a mobile phone. Assigned to collaboratively develop an oral report of their findings, students had to engage with the materiality of five different locations, negotiate a narrative, and analyze their learning back in the classroom. Augmented reality may also be useful to learners exploring the linguistic landscape (Bruzos, Reference Bruzos, Malinowski, Maxim and Dubreil2020; Malinowski & Dubreil, Reference Malinowski, Dubreil and Chapelle2019) of multilingual urban communities at home or abroad. Social robots, including intelligent personal assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, have not yet been widely used for language learning purposes, but preliminary studies (e.g. Cai, Pan, & Liu, Reference Cai, Pan and Liu2022; Dizon, Tang, & Yamamoto, Reference Dizon, Tang and Yamamoto2022) show their potential benefit, especially for learning vocabulary and pronunciation.

The realization of MALL’s potential may well rely on the guidance of teachers, however. As Stockwell (Reference Stockwell, Farr and Murray2016) points out, even though it is easy to assume that language learners are fully capable of using technology for a range of uses, this is not necessarily the case. Stockwell underlines the importance not only of technical training but also “strategic training” and “pedagogical training” (i.e. communicating to learners why the particular tasks/activities are important to their learning), which have been shown to increase learners’ time on task, enhance their attitude toward mobile learning, and improve their language performance (p. 303). Furthermore, Blyth (Reference Blyth2018) reminds us that although smart technologies are good with literal meanings, their interpretive capabilities are less sensitive to context than humans’ and consequently teachers will need to continue to stress meaning-making in context, along with the pragmatic knowledge to interpret it – and that this is particularly important in multimodal and intercultural communication.

Creativity

Language learners have more options than ever for expressing themselves. Social media environments like TikTok provide an audiovisual playground, allowing learners to take on identities they could not assume in “real” life (Albawardi & Jones, Reference Albawardi and Jones2020). Multimodal composition (Yi, Shin, & Cimasko, Reference Yi, Shin and Cimasko2020), incorporating video, photographs, drawings, animation, voice, text, or music to develop short personal filmic narratives, requires learners to adapt or transfer their understanding of composition to meet their rhetorical objectives (Alexander, DePalma, & Ringer, Reference Alexander, DePalma and Ringer2016). It also calls for new assessment perspectives on the part of teachers. Whereas academic norms of traditional writing are well established, norms and standards relevant to multimedia composition are more elusive and will vary widely with context of use. Hafner and Ho (Reference Hafner and Ho2020) propose a multistage, process-oriented model for assessing multimodal compositions in both formative and summative ways. One aspect of multimodal composition that can be challenging for teachers is its very multimodality: to what extent should language remain the central focus in the context of a language class (Polio, Reference Polio2019)? A second challenging aspect is the widespread practice of remixing, or combining and manipulating cultural artifacts to produce something new (Knobel & Lankshear, Reference Knobel and Lankshear2008). At what point is appropriation simply plagiarism, and when does it count as creative innovation? Wondering whether appropriation promotes or obscures learners’ voices, Hafner (Reference Hafner2015) concludes that it can do both, depending on how it is used. What seems clear from research on multimodal composition is that learners need teacher guidance in thinking through the ethics of appropriation in their digital creations.Footnote ²

Communities

Participation in communities has long been an important component of language learning. One key principle for teachers to keep in mind is that technology allows students not only to interact in novel ways with one another but also to participate in multiple communities that extend far beyond the classroom – and that the classroom can be used as a space to reflect on students’ experiences in those communities.

Within the classroom community, synchronous and asynchronous written discussions can transform the habitual interpersonal dynamics of face-to-face interaction, often boosting the quantity and quality of students’ participation, especially among those who tend to be quiet in class discussions (Kern, Reference Kern1995). Students’ self-presentations on social media (e.g. Instagram or TikTok) allow students to learn about one another’s interests and talents in ways that might be more difficult to accomplish face-to-face in the classroom.

Outside class, exchanges with pen pals, partner classes, or other speakers of the target language can provide communicative practice, intercultural learning, and external validation of learners’ language abilities. Research under the rubrics of virtual exchange, telecollaboration, or collaborative online international learning (COIL) is voluminous, but O’Dowd and O’Rourke (Reference O’Dowd and O’Rourke2019) and Potolia and Derivry-Plard (Reference Potolia and Derivry-Plard2023) offer excellent starting points.

Fan fiction (Sauro, Reference Sauro2017) is one way language learners can participate in more virtual communities. Fans of television shows, movies, books, plays, video games (or of celebrities such as actors, musicians, and athletes) use digital environments to discuss an episode or, most often, elaborate their own creative adaptations or extensions of narratives. Online collaborative games, such as Pokemon Go! or World of Warcraft, offer motivating goal-driven opportunities for communicative interaction, decision-making, and collaboration with other players (Sykes, Reference Sykes2018; Thorne, Black, & Sykes, Reference Thorne, Black and Sykes2009). Virtual reality (VR) environments like Second Life stimulate learners’ imagination, allowing them to create immersive community contexts that allow them to experiment with identities through avatars. Lan (Reference Lan2020) warns, however, that if teachers do not play an active role in organizing and facilitating activities that involve learners in generating questions, testing hypotheses, and learning from feedback, VR can become “just another new fancy technology that can easily lose support from teachers and the interest of students as its novelty fades” (p. X). On the other hand, overly zealous teacher-structuring of tasks can also cause student interest and motivation to flag, so attention to students’ “desire lines” (Thorne, Reference Thorne2019) and finding a balance between unfettered individual curiosity-driven exploration and pedagogical structure is important. Above all, teachers should provide learners with opportunities for scaffolded reflection on their community interactions so they can share and learn from the communication difficulties, misunderstandings, cultural surprises, or moments of insight or elation they experience.

Challenges in CALL Teacher Education

As mentioned in the previous section, teachers take on multiple roles in using technology for teaching practices. What specific knowledge and skills teachers should prepare and how the contents should be taught to train teachers have recently attracted research in CALL teacher education (Son, Reference Son2018). Regarding the competence necessary for language teachers to integrate technology into classrooms, Hampel and Stickler (Reference Hampel and Stickler2005) propose a pyramid of skills ranging from lower level skills (e.g. basic computer skills, competence in using specific software, dealing with constraints and affordances of the software) to higher level skills (e.g. creating a community, facilitating communication as well as creativity, choice, selection, and development of their own teaching style). In order to help teachers to develop these competences, Son (Reference Son2018) suggests providing different types of training (i.e. formal and informal learning) to teachers, according to their varying needs. However, previous studies measuring the effectiveness of teacher training have found a gap between teacher education and teaching practices. For example, Stockwell (Reference Stockwell2009) conducted a seminar with self-direction strategies to train teachers to educate themselves to acquire CALL knowledge. However, the results showed that most of the teachers preferred using existing resources rather than the new methods that had been introduced.

Insufficient training and professional development have been pointed out as the most problematic issues in CALL education, where institutions should take on a crucial role. Inadequate policy at institutional levels to facilitate teachers’ CALL usage has been criticized (Stockwell, Reference Stockwell2009). For example, many schools purchase iPads and ask teachers to use them for teaching without clear guidelines as to how iPada are expected to be used. Without a specific purpose to integrate iPads into the classroom, it is no surprise that teachers feel uncomfortable changing their existing teaching. The lack of professional CALL trainers who are familiar with both technology and language education to help language teachers with better use of technology has been problematic (Doshmanziari & Mostafavi, Reference Doshmanziari and Mostafavi2017). Although institutions have been putting effort into providing financial and technical support, something is missing. Researchers have suggested teacher learning communities (see Chapter 22, this volume) where teachers can help each other by sharing knowledge and providing feedback to peers. Yet, research has shown that the outcomes of teacher collaboration are not always positive as teachers’ needs, competence, and teaching experience vary. A one-size-fits-all learning group may not meet the variety of professional learning requirements. Moreover, the diversity in social and cultural contexts affects the teacher community’s effectiveness (de Jong, Meirink, & Admiraal, Reference de Jong, Meirink and Admiraal2019; Little, Reference Little2003).

Teachers’ Resistance to Technology Usage

The interest in CALL in teacher education and research into teacher education has been accelerating since the turn of the twenty-first century (Kessler & Hubbard, Reference Kessler, Hubbard, Chapelle and Sauro2017); nevertheless, there remain teachers who are unwilling to integrate new technology into their teaching practices, and the reasons are still unclear (Howard & Mozejko, Reference Howard, Mozejko, Henderson and Romeo2015; Stockwell & Reinders, Reference Stockwell and Reinders2019). Among the wide range of factors that hinder teacher’s adoption of CALL and adaptation to it, Ertmer (Reference Ertmer1999) categorizes two main barriers to change, which he calls first-order and second-order barriers. Accordingly, the first-order (extrinsic) barriers refer to the lack of resources, accessibility, equipment, time, training, and support provided in teaching environments. These extrinsic factors are incremental but can be easily observed and overcome with the help of institutions (e.g. providing funds, technical support, adequate training). However, the second-order (intrinsic) barriers are fundamental and personal, referring to teachers’ views of technology integration and affective factors, which are “typically rooted in teachers’ underlying beliefs about teaching and learning and may not be immediately apparent to others or even to the teachers themselves” (Ertmer, Reference Ertmer1999, p. 51). This indicates the difficulty of measuring and eliminating teachers’ intrinsic barriers. These barriers overwhelm the extrinsic barriers, as Ertmer (Reference Ertmer1999) notes that “even if every first-order barrier were removed, teachers would not automatically use technology to achieve the kind of meaningful outcomes advocated here” (p. 52). Many institutions provide teachers with sufficient digital devices (e.g. PCs and tablets), equipment, and network to resolve access constraints, along with technical training and support. However, some teachers are still reluctant to adopt the new methods due to their internal concerns. It seems that teachers’ resistance to educational technology involves various issues which have been rooted in the educational system.

Affordances and Perceived Barriers of Technology

Teachers’ reluctance to the pedagogical use of technology is usually transferred to learners. Although constrained by institutional policy, teachers generally have some freedom to select the technology that they regard as useful for classroom practices, aligning with their teaching beliefs. Although technology may help teachers in their teaching effectiveness, at the same time, it is not without constraints. Being aware of what technology can/cannot bring us may help teachers work through the obstacles to technology integration into teaching contexts.

To explain the potentials and limitations of technology, Gibson (Reference Gibson1979) coined the term “affordances,” which he described as “the complementarity of the animal and the environment” (p. 127) from an ecological perspective. Later on, Gaver (Reference Gaver, Robertson, Olson and Olson1991) used the term to explore how technology can be used depending on the potential of technology and humans’ perceptual information, suggesting that “affordances exist whether or not they are perceived, but it is because they are inherently about important properties that they need to be perceived” (p. 80). Similarly, Beatty (Reference Beatty2010) referred to affordances as “the visual clues that an object gives to its use as well as what it is capable of doing in terms of both intended and unintended functions” (p. 50) and further constructed the word “misaffordances” to emphasize something that “distract[s] from the object’s intended use” (p. 243). The notion of affordances underlines how technologies may be used appropriately or misused by the user; also, the affordances of a particular technology that teachers perceive may foster or hinder their usage (Stockwell, Reference Stockwell2012). In other words, the use of technology may enhance the effectiveness of language education. Still, it should be noted that there are some perceived barriers to the successful integration of technology in teaching practices.

Stockwell (Reference Stockwell2022) identified three main issues regarding general technology implementation in educational settings: physical, psycho-social, and pedagogical issues. While used to describe mobile-assisted language learning, these categories are equally applicable to CALL. Physical issues are characteristics of the devices, for example, screen size, input methods, storage capacity, processor speeds, battery life, compatibility, and network access. Psycho-social issues are related to the user’s views on the devices, their willingness or resistance to engage in activities with technology, attentional involvement, distraction, addictive effect, and, also, how the user perceives others’ views in the social context. Pedagogical issues related to task or activity designs for second language learning and teaching involve teaching approaches and learning methods. Thus, when integrating technology into language classes, it should be kept in mind that the affordances of technology can relate to the design and functions, which determine the usefulness teachers perceive. Based on individuals’ experiences, skills, and digital competences, different teachers have different attitudes toward educational technology. These attitudes influence their decisions to adopt new technology.

Contextual Factors

Given that individuals have different perceptions of technology, the factors affecting teachers’ adoption of educational technology for language learning and teaching purposes are complex, involving individual aspects to environmental aspects. Researchers suggest looking into the complexity of contextual aspects to give a complete picture. Emphasizing the vital role that context plays in shaping teachers’ and students’ perceptions of educational technology, Stockwell (Reference Stockwell2012) breaks down three levels of diversity in CALL: individual, institutional, and societal factors that affect how CALL can be implemented and used. These three levels are interrelated and develop the language educational setting. To put it another way, teachers and students interact with technology in the classroom setting. Outside the classroom, a group of teachers with common goals and interests may support each other’s ongoing professional development. These individuals (i.e. teachers and learners) are grouped into an institution in which they are necessarily affected by the institutional factors. For example, teachers and students have to follow institutional policies and guidelines to use a certain technology. Meanwhile, the institution itself is shaped by the society in which it is located, and in turn society is shaped by the individuals that comprise it.

Figure 21.1 illustrates the factors affecting teachers’ resistance to technology and how individual factors influence how they use technology for language teaching purposes, and how they affect each other (e.g. their students and peers) within a certain context. Nested in an educational system, it is difficult to say which factor is more significant than the others, since they are all interrelated. Constrained by institutional policies, teachers are usually restricted or authorized to decide what and how to teach in their classrooms. Furthermore, sociocultural factors play a crucial role in influencing how people perceive themselves and others who shape the institution, the teacher community, and the classroom culture. As has been found in Wang’s (Reference Wang2021) study, the language teachers in a Japanese university were unaware of whether the other teachers were using technology to teach in their classrooms. It was also found that there was a lack of sharing and discussion on teaching methods among the teachers, though they were in the same department. The strict hierarchical relationship may hamper the professional learning community, since the teachers were aware of the others with concerns about standing out from their senpai (juniors). In addition, being different from the others seems not to be encouraged in the context (see also Bartlett, Reference Bartlett2020). This outlines the challenge for institutions in facilitating teacher communities with trust and better interactions.

Figure 21.1 Contextual factors affecting teachers’ resistance to educational technology.

The CALL environments constructed by these contextual factors have recently attracted attention in CALL research. It is suggested that researchers should look deep into the CALL context, as a variety of components are connected, from cultural, social, political, and institutional elements, to teaching practices and students’ interaction (Blin, Reference Blin, Farr and Murray2016). This range of factors highlights that the CALL context in which language education occurs influences the interrelationships between learners, teachers, and technology; furthermore, individuals’ perceptions shaped by the context make heavy impacts on their adoption, selection, and implementation of technology.

Recommendations for Research

Studies have shown that teachers’ attitudes toward educational technology are not always aligned with their actual usage (Turner et al., Reference Turner, Kitchenham, Brereton, Charters and Budgen2010; Wang, Reference Wang2021). Although teachers claim they are interested in technology, there is no guarantee that they will adopt new teaching methods that use it. As a result, if conducting research into teacher attitudes and use of technology, mixed-methods research is suggested with multiple data resources to avoid relying heavily on a single data resource that may cause bias. Thus, a single survey to investigate teachers’ perceptions of technology use is inadequate.

Moreover, as Wang’s (Reference Wang2021) study found, existing theories could not explain the whole picture of educational technology adoption, and so there is a need for specific CALL theories. Since the field of CALL stretches across technology and second language acquisition (SLA), each of the theories seems not to describe the phenomenon appropriately. For instance, the well-known technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis, Reference Davis1989) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh et al., Reference Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis2003) might be useful to understand certain variables that influence users’ behavioral intentions to use a specific technology. However, the models ignore that foreign language teachers and learners have specific needs and purposes for using technology (see Shachak, Kuziemsky, & Petersen, Reference Shachak, Kuziemsky and Petersen2019 for the criticism). The educational contexts might differ from normal settings as well. Users of educational technology, specifically teachers and students constrained by the classroom climate and institutional policies, are influenced by social and cultural contexts. That is, the reasons why teachers are reluctant to adopt new technology are shaped by contextual factors that affect how they think and behave. Therefore, when conducting research regarding educational technology adoption, researchers should be aware that what we can see might be the tip of the iceberg. Simply extracting variables from existing frameworks can limit the factors that we can explore and in fact cloud our view of other less salient features.

In this sense, the final implication for research is the need for ethnographical studies and longitudinal studies in the CALL field. Many existing theoretical frameworks are insufficient to explain teachers’ resistance; hence, observing teachers in their educational setting can help to understand the sociocultural situation to interpret teachers’ resistance in terms of their attitudes and behaviors. It is also suggested that longitudinal studies are worth conducting to investigate teachers’ willingness or resistance to change across a period of time. Since attitudes change over time, surveys taken at one point in time are unlikely to reveal the salient factors. By exploring what is ‘under the surface’ of external and internal barriers in a naturalistic setting, we can discover the difficulties that teachers are facing in educational technology integration.

Recommendations for Institutions

Understanding why teachers resist technology may help overcome the difficulties they have and then provide teachers and students with a better pedagogical environment. Despite the fact that external barriers can be observed and resolved, teachers may be reluctant to accept technical and pedagogical support due to internal factors. For instance, though the university has its technical support team, teachers may regard it as a group of non-experts on pedagogy and do not want them to interfere with their teaching (Wang, Reference Wang2021). This concern highlights the need for CALL specialists and professionals (Hubbard & Levy, Reference Hubbard and Levy2006) who specialize in technology and language teaching to enhance teaching effectiveness. Since language classes are so different from the regular lecture classes, language teachers’ need for support might differ from the “one-size-fits-all” support center.

More critically speaking, institutions need to be aware of teachers’ internal barriers. Previous negative experiences with technology may hamper teachers’ expectations for new technology. When institutions are trying to promote a specific technology or to replace the existing technology with a new one, it may be helpful to explain the reasons for implementation. Also, there may be complexities in a hierarchical social environment. How to facilitate teachers to work together without the threat of “hurting the harmony” appears to be a challenge for institutions. The characters of a specific sociocultural context seem unlikely to be changed. However, providing teachers with a comfortable workplace with no fear of “losing face” might help teachers to become more willing to develop their professional skills. Therefore, institutions may help organize consulting groups for teachers or provide resources for teachers’ professional development.

Additionally, institutions should also provide ongoing training for teachers to facilitate technology utilization in the workplace. Having not received training in foreign language education or technology use, the teachers tend to teach according to their classroom experiences or each in the ways they had been taught. Thus, a lack of knowledge in SLA appears to be a more urgent problem than technology adoption. The end goals for institutions should not merely be increasing the adoption of classroom technology on a larger scale but should be using technology to enhance a positive educational environment for faculty and students. If not, perhaps we should not have unreasonable expectations for technology. What has not been done in the real world might not miraculously appear in the virtual world. That is, if the teachers and students lack interactions in the classroom, they are unlikely to communicate enthusiastically through technology (e.g. a learning management system or a social networking site). In a similar vein, teacher-centered classrooms will not switch to student-centered environments simply by using technology.

The main conclusion that can be drawn in this section is that governments and institutions should be more aware of the purpose of promoting educational technology. It should not be a competition to compare who uses technology more in the classroom. After all, it is quality, not quantity, that counts – how and what educators use for teaching and the outcomes matter. How to encourage teachers to use educational technology as the administration expects might be an ongoing challenge. When establishing institutional policies regarding technology implementation, it might be helpful if both teachers and students take part in the decision-making process. Listening to teachers’ and students’ voices might also lead to an understanding of the actual conditions and difficulties in technology integration.

Recommendations for Pedagogy

The key to success for educational technology integration into foreign language classes may be teachers, who play a crucial role in educational settings, making most of the decisions for the students regarding what materials to use, and what approaches to teach (whether with or without technology). Only if teachers value CALL technology can it be successfully utilized. The potential of technology may be overestimated by governments and underestimated by teachers with a lack of professional knowledge in terms of CALL. It is not the fault of technology, but rather, the responsibility lies with humans. With a lack of understanding of technology and SLA, teachers may have limited technology use and rarely adopt new teaching methods. It is expected that experienced in-service teachers are satisfied with their current teaching, which might become the main obstacle to accepting new teaching methods. Their beliefs about teaching and learning seem to be established in the early stage of their career. Moreover, there is no urgent need for them to change their existing teaching practices. Since most of the teachers have not only teaching work but also administrative work and research activities, integrating educational technology into the classrooms might increase their workload, which means that they have to change the existing syllabus and adjust their current teaching styles. As a consequence, avoiding technology might be a safe way for experienced teachers. However, the more “new methods” teachers try, the more questions may arise about teaching and learning. Using technology for education may not reduce teachers’ workload, but it provides teachers with an opportunity to reflect on their existing teaching.

Stepping out of their comfort zone, teachers may find that their fears are unfounded. Students are not as competent or confident with their digital skills as we might expect. They still need teachers’ professional support. Students may be familiar with technology, but they do not know how to use it for language learning. We should keep in mind that the students of today may be teachers in the future, which means that they may teach someday in the same way as they have been taught. After all, teachers’ attitudes toward new methods affect students’ perceptions in some sense. If teachers are more willing to try different teaching methods, students may benefit from various learning strategies that meet their needs and interests. Also, teachers should provide students with not only language knowledge but also technical and psychological support. For example, teachers should give students more control over their learning and encourage them to learn with technology, which allows students to practice learning autonomy.

Last but not least, traditional teaching roles may be challenged by educational technology, but every teacher and teacher-to-be should all be prepared to use technology for teaching. Teachers should be aware that technology will not replace teachers, but teachers who do not use technology may be replaced. Moreover, in-service teachers should be open-minded to learn up-to-date SLA theories and trends, which can help integrate technology into teaching practices more effectively. Otherwise, technology becomes simply a tool to make existing teaching look “fancy,” without any real improvements to education.

Potential Benefits of Teachers’ Use of Online Teacher Communities

According to Lantz-Anderson, Lundin, and Selwyn (Reference Lantz-Andersson, Lundin and Selwyn2018), who conducted a systematic review of empirical studies on online teacher communities, one commonly identified benefit is that online communities provide teachers with a source of information about their teaching. For instance, Carpenter and Krutka (Reference Carpenter and Krutka2015) employed a questionnaire that received 755 responses from teachers who use Twitter professionally and found that they most frequently use the platform to share and acquire teaching-related resources (96 per cent). In their study, participants reported on a number of occasions when their actual lessons had been directly influenced by the ideas and resources accessed through Twitter. Specifically, twenty-six participants reported that they were able to learn about educational technologies, with several of them commenting that their involvement in Twitter contributed to an increased knowledge and use of them in their classes. Although the extent to which the acquired information affects teaching practice is not yet fully known, the study illustrates how some teachers value these platforms for teaching ideas and resources that they otherwise “may not come in contact with due to limitations of professional development money” (Carpenter & Krutka, Reference Carpenter and Krutka2015, p. 718).

Another frequently mentioned benefit is that online teacher communities provide teachers with a space where they can ask for help. For example, Yildirim (Reference Yildirim2019), who observed a Facebook community for high school mathematics teachers in Turkey, found that teachers were seeking assistance, mainly asking questions about mathematical problems. Over 90 percent of the mathematical problems shared in the online community were solved during the one-month long observation, and the interviews conducted with fourteen of the members suggest that the posts asking for help were responded to quickly and the feedback rarely contained any mistakes. Besides mathematical problems, teachers in the community were asking questions related to school curriculum, resources, techno-pedagogical information, and university entrance examinations to seek advice. Since online communities are used by a range of teachers of varying teaching backgrounds, experiences, and levels of expertise, they offer easy access to an array of thoughts, opinions, and perspectives.

In addition to providing professional support, prior research has also illustrated that online teacher communities are providing teachers with a source of emotional support. In Davis’ (Reference Davis2015) study, for instance, seventeen out of nineteen interviewees participating in the discussions occurring in an online teacher community on Twitter indicated in their interviews that they felt a sense of belonging through engaging with each other on the online platform. Some interviewees also reported that they perceived the online community as a source of encouragement when they were feeling discouraged as a teacher. Closely related to this, in multiple studies (e.g. Carpenter & Krutka, Reference Carpenter and Krutka2015; Carpenter et al., Reference Carpenter, Morrison, Craft, Lee and Michalene2020a; Ito, Reference Ito2023b; Wesely, Reference Wesely2013), teachers were evidently participating in online communities to combat professional isolation. Drawing from multiple data sources, including participant observation of a Twitter community for world language teachers and interviews with nine community members, Wesely (Reference Wesely2013) found that many community members struggled with professional isolation, several of whom were working as the only foreign language teacher in a geographically remote area, teaching a certain foreign language within a single school, or receiving limited support from their administrators and coworkers. The findings suggested that they were joining the observed online community for world language teachers on Twitter to ameliorate their feelings of professional loneliness and isolation.

Potential Challenges in Teachers’ Use of Online Teacher Communities

It is clear that online teacher communities bring value to teachers’ professional lives, but they are not without flaws. As outlined as one of the key benefits in the previous section, online teacher communities potentially offer teachers a place where they can explore ideas by searching through the rich source of shared information. However, since, as Carpenter and Harvey (Reference Carpenter and Harvey2019, p. 1) point out, “there’s no referee on social media,” the quality of the content shared in the online teacher communities is not always guaranteed. Although community administrators may delete posts that are obviously wrong or misleading (Staudt, St. Clair, & Martinez, Reference Staudt, Clair and Martinez2013), the shared content at times may not be credible or reliable. For example, Hertel and Wessman-Enzinger (Reference Hertel and Wessman-Enzinger2017) analyzed 176 mathematics teaching resources shared on Pinterest, finding that approximately one-third of the posts contained some type of mathematical error. Moreover, in some cases, teachers may find the posts shared in the online communities unpleasant. In Carpenter and Harvey’s (Reference Carpenter and Harvey2019) study, 43.8 percent of the teachers (n=21) who were utilizing online teacher communities on SNSs reported that they came across posts that were deemed unprofessional, with one teacher describing that she was frustrated by three individuals who were “dropping vulgar language when it wasn’t necessary” (p. 6). Furthermore, in the same study, a number of teachers expressed that they were frustrated at posts that were promoting commercial products or posts that were not related to teaching. This seems to illuminate a growing problem that online teacher communities are attracting unwanted “spam” messages (i.e. posts that are irrelevant or unsolicited) (Carpenter et al., Reference Carpenter, Staudt Willet, Koehler and Greenhalgh2020b), which may also have an impact on how they are perceived and used. In closed Facebook groups (e.g. Yildirim, Reference Yildirim2019) and online discussion boards hosted on Reddit (e.g. Staudt Willet & Carpenter, Reference Staudt Willet and Carpenter2020), administrators may be able to filter out obvious spam posts, but platforms such as Twitter are largely unmoderated and therefore dealing with such posts may be more difficult (Carpenter et al., Reference Carpenter, Staudt Willet, Koehler and Greenhalgh2020b).

Moreover, an additional challenge regarding teachers’ use of online teacher communities relates to the issue of time. Although online teacher communities enable teachers to interact with others in the comfort of their own homes, one point easily forgotten is that participating in online teacher communities still requires a considerable amount of time and effort on the teacher’s part. For example, in a study conducted by Duncan-Howell (Reference Duncan-Howell2010), it was found that some teachers in online teacher communities spent up to six hours a week reading through the online posts and engaging in discussions with community members. Despite spending a notable amount of time participating in the communities, teachers’ efforts are not always recognized and appreciated by peers or their employers. Administrators or fellow colleagues may not accept this unconventional form of supporting or learning as “actual work,” making it difficult for them to access the online communities during working hours at the workplace (Davis, Reference Davis2015). Another challenge related to this point is the blurring of boundaries between work and private time. While busy teachers may be initially attracted to online communities because they can use them in their spare time, one danger of this is that without realizing, they may end up spending long hours on these spaces and potentially feeling overburdened with all the additional work.

The difficulty in sustaining an active online community should also be noted as another potential challenge. A study by Rutherford (Reference Rutherford2010), which extensively examined a teacher community on Facebook for teachers teaching in Ontario for a one-year period between 2007 and 2008, revealed that only 384 members were participating in the discussions despite having nearly eight thousand community members. In a similar vein, in a study of eight years’ worth of posts shared in a large technology-focused teacher community on Facebook with over 20,000 members, Nelimarkka et al. (Reference Nelimarkka, Leinonen, Durall and Dean2021) found that only approximately 10 percent of the members were actively writing posts and comments. A large number of online community members are typically reported to be “lurkers” (i.e. members who mostly observe the community without actively participating in the discussions) (Goodyear, Parker, & Casey, Reference Goodyear, Parker and Casey2019), but if too many members lurk without actively posting or commenting, the community will likely fail and discontinued.

Task-Oriented Interactions in Computer-Mediated and FTF Contexts

The first batch of studies on technology-mediated TBLT aims at comparing the interactions in computer-mediated and FTF environments. Descriptive and empirical research has provided compelling evidence that interactional features which have been found to foster L2 development in FTF contexts, such as negotiation for meaning and modified output, can and do occur in technology-mediated task-based environments (Chong & Reinders, Reference Chong and Reinders2020; Iwasaki & Oliver, Reference Iwasaki and Oliver2003; Lee, Hampel, & Kukulska-Hulme, Reference Lee, Hampel and Kukulska-Hulme2019; Monteiro, Reference Monteiro2014; Ziegler & Phung, Reference Ziegler and Phung2019). For example, tasks commonly found in FTF TBLT research such as decision-making and information-gap tasks have been reported to be fruitful in eliciting learner interaction and negotiation in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) context (Pellettieri, Reference Pellettieri1999). Research has also explored the preference for self-repair with respect to negotiation of meaning in online CMC (Jepson, Reference Jepson2005; Lee, Reference Lee2001; Smith, Reference Smith2009; Yüksel & İnan, Reference Yüksel and İnan2014). Results indicate that meaning negotiation in task-based text chat differs from that in FTF interactions (Kern, Reference Kern1995; Pellettieri, Reference Pellettieri, Warschauer and Kern2000; van der Zwaard & Bannink, Reference van der Zwaard and Bannink2016; Yüksel & İnan, Reference Yüksel and İnan2014). It is maintained that meaning negotiation occurs more in CMC than in FTF interactions since it (1) enables learners to negotiate meaning at their own pace (Castañeda, Reference Castañeda2021; Fernández-García & Martínez-Arbelaiz, Reference Fernández-García and Martínez-Arbelaiz2002); (2) enhances noticing of L2 forms and meaning (Canals, Reference Canals2021; Pellettieri, Reference Pellettieri, Warschauer and Kern2000; Shekary & Tahririan, Reference Shekary and Tahririan2006); (3) advances learning of lexical items (Fernández-García & Martínez-Arbelaiz, Reference Fernández-García and Martínez-Arbelaiz2002; Smith, Reference Smith2004, Reference Smith2009); (4) promotes grammatical competence (Pellettieri, Reference Pellettieri, Warschauer and Kern2000); (5) enhances motivation and positive attitudes (Canals, Reference Canals2020; Taghizadeh & Ejtehadi, Reference Taghizadeh and Ejtehadi2021); and lastly (6) improves oral production skills (Canals, Reference Canals2020).

Although the majority of research in this realm has lent credence to the affordances of CMC in terms of enhancing negotiation of meaning and L2 development, it should be noted that there are other studies that show negotiation in CMC is not as abundant as in FTF interactions (e.g. Jepson, Reference Jepson2005; Moradi & Farvardin, Reference Moradi and Farvardin2020; Ribeiro & Eslami, Reference Ribeiro and Eslami2022; van der Zwaard & Bannink, Reference van der Zwaard and Bannink2016). The variations in the results of previous research clearly point to important differences, such as variations in triggers and patterns in the different contexts. Thus, more research is required to deepen our understanding of how patterns of interaction may alter across individual technologies. Research has indicated that written text-chat is characterized by distinctive patterns of negotiation and turn-taking (Smith, Reference Smith2003), underlying the necessity of research into whether learners taking part in mobile-assisted or multiuser gaming or immersive environments negotiate meaning in unique ways. Future research is encouraged to consider how types of technology affect the quantity and quality of interaction during task-based learning and teaching. On the whole, however, studies in this area suggest that negotiation and its advantages seem to be accessible to learners in computer-mediated task-based interactions, attesting the effectiveness of technology in task-based contexts.

Design and Use of Tasks in Technology-Mediated Contexts

Although the studies reviewed in the previous section indicate the positive effects of text chat in engaging learners in interaction, it is not simply the technology, but the design and use of appropriate tasks through the medium of technology that is likely to promote learning opportunities (Adams & Nik, Reference Adams, Nik, González‐Lloret and Ortega2014). Earlier, Ortega (Reference Ortega1997) also stressed the significance of investigating tasks, their conditions, and processes in order to reach firm conclusions about the role of CMC in L2 learning. Moreover, given that CMC unites features of both spoken and written language with aspects of the digital context (Herring, Reference Herring1996), it is vital to explore CMC tasks as activities in their own right instead of considering that tasks effective at eliciting quality L2 interaction in FTF exchanges will also do so in CMC (González-Lloret, Reference González-Lloret, Chapelle and Sauro2017).

This relatively new avenue of research led to a small number of studies exploring which task types (in the traditional FTF definition), with which features (e.g. level of complexity) and under which conditions (e.g. through which media) could be more effective in inducing interactions and thereby bring about L2 development (Blake, Reference Blake2000; Keller‐Lally, Reference Keller‐Lally2006; Mohamadi Zenouzagh, Reference Mohamadi Zenouzagh2022; Smith, Reference Smith2003; Yilmaz & Granena, Reference Yilmaz and Granena2010). However, literature offers contradictory findings, with some studies (e.g. Blake, Reference Blake2000) reporting the superiority of jigsaw tasks over information‐gap and decision‐making tasks in generating more negotiation, others indicating the reverse, that is decision‐making tasks, enriched with unfamiliar lexical items, stimulating more negotiation than jigsaw tasks (Smith, Reference Smith2003), or showing the superior effectiveness of dictogloss over the jigsaw in terms of noticing (Yilmaz & Granena, Reference Yilmaz and Granena2010), and yet others (Keller‐Lally, Reference Keller‐Lally2006) finding no impact for task type (jigsaw, decision‐making, or opinion exchange). These findings hint that task design may play a significant role in L2 learning and use in CMC.

As for task characteristics, research in TBLT has focused on whether manipulating the cognitive demands of tasks influences learners’ L2 productions. A few early studies (Adams & Nik Reference Adams, Nik, González‐Lloret and Ortega2014; Baralt, Reference Baralt2013; Nik et al., Reference Nik, Adams and Newton2012) investigated the validity of FTF task complexity theories, specifically Robinson’s (Reference Robinson and Bygate2015) cognition hypothesis. Nevertheless, Robinson’s predictions have not necessarily transferred to task performances in technology-enhanced contexts. Adams and Nik (Reference Adams, Nik, González‐Lloret and Ortega2014) attribute this to the distinctive nature of the text-based CMC medium, where there are more opportunities for processing output than in the FTF interaction. Furthermore, in contrast to speech production, there is a delay between production and transmission of message in CMC which is likely to impact the cognitive burden imposed by the production (Adams & Nik, Reference Adams, Nik, González‐Lloret and Ortega2014). This clarification receives support from Baralt’s (Reference Baralt2013) research, which compared the reasoning demands of an FTF versus a CMC task. Her findings confirmed the validity of this prediction in the FTF context yet not in the CMC environment, where more learning occurred in the less complex conditions. Thus far, the existing – albeit very limited – research suggests that the unique features of CMC mediate the complexity of tasks as is reported in FTF task-based research, underscoring the necessity of examining tasks developed for and embedded in the technology.

Tasks with Web 2.0 Technologies

Web 2.0 technologies represent a class of technologies that allow the development and exchange of user-generated content. Three-dimensional (3D) multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), such as World of Warcraft, Active Worlds, and SimCity, have gained popularity among the Net Generation because of their affordances in terms of simulation, immersion, creativity, and collaboration (Chen, Reference Chen2020). Second Life has also attracted the attention of L2 learners wanting to discover this lively 3D space and interact with other users in world languages. Admittedly, the learning-by-doing principle of TBLT is well suited to the immersive nature of Second Life, which boosts reality and enriches the learner’s learning experience (Chen, Reference Chen2020). In addition, it enhances the use of language for communicative, meaningful, and experiential purposes (Chun, Kern, & Smith, Reference Chun, Kern and Smith2016).

Also prevalent among this group of technologies are blogs (e.g. Reinhardt, Reference Reinhardt2019) and wikis (e.g. Khezrlou, Reference Khezrlou2022; Reinhardt, Reference Reinhardt2019). All these technologies share the common objective of forming a bridge between inside and outside classroom tasks, which lead to authenticity in the classroom, present a genuine context for learners, offer a real audience for their writing, and join them with other speakers with the same interest, all crucial tenets of TBLT (González-Lloret, Reference González-Lloret, Chapelle and Sauro2017). Research has provided some evidence that blogs may function as spaces for culture learning and intercultural exchange, as well as for reflection, self-presentation, and the development and articulation of knowledge on topics in which learners have some say (for a recent review see Reinhardt, Reference Reinhardt2019). Research has also reported that tasks which impose specific topics, demand form-focused peer review, limit audiences, expand audiences, or are closed in nature may restrict learner autonomy and not advocate the learning potentials of blogs, even though the tasks might match with curricular purposes and learner expectations (e.g. Chen, Shih, & Liu, Reference Chen, Shih and Liu2015). As with blogs, wikis are effective learning tools as long as needs and tasks are truly enhanced by wiki structures and an awareness of ways and reasons behind using wikis is addressed through contextualized and explicit instruction (see Reinhardt, Reference Reinhardt2019). Building awareness might entail “exploring with students the concepts of collective intelligence and crowdsourced wisdom, for example in social media like Reddit or Digg – two popular tools” (Reinhardt, Reference Reinhardt2019, p. 17), the use of which in task-based courses has yet to be explored fully.