This article reports on a 7-week virtual exchange (VE) involving teacher candidates in three countries in co-creation of learning materials based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The aim of the study was to investigate whether and how the participants found a VE project focused on global citizenship education beneficial for their training as English language teachers. Through the lens of critical and reflexive interculturality, the researchers analyzed VE participants' self-reported data in relation to four categories on global competence: investigating the world, acknowledging perspectives, sharing ideas, and taking action (OECD, 2019). Participants reported that cross-cultural collaboration on a professionally oriented task was a potentially empowering activity enabling future teachers not only to gain intercultural and pedagogical self-awareness, but also to understand TESOL from both local and global perspectives. With relevance for teacher educators and teachers in the wider international TESOL community, the findings contribute to the growing body of research demonstrating the value of merging VE with global citizenship education in TESOL teacher preparation.

The use of digital technology in the subject of Swedish as a second language (SSL) has increased in recent years. Schools in Sweden have received many newly arrived students due to the migration situation prevailing in contemporary European society. This article shares the findings of a study carried out on six SSL teachers' perceptions and experiences of using digital technology for SSL with newly arrived students. Participants' responses to interview questions were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings indicated the following: participants negotiated the digital tools as an entry ticket for the newly arrived students to become engaged with the teaching, to support literacy development, and to aid communication. The findings also underscore the challenges that respondents struggled with in teaching using digital technology. Results suggest that although digital technology is a regular part of Swedish education, there is no clear research-based framework for computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in SSL education or teacher education that teachers can rely on, meaning that it is up to teachers themselves to uncover relevant uses of digital technology to support SSL teaching.

In the digital wilds, thriving storytelling practices (often in transcultural and multilingual contexts) share with Maker culture a belief in learning through doing, bricolage, collaboration, and playfulness. Key examples are fanfiction, a form of creative writing that transforms popular media in some way, and interactive fiction, a form of nonlinear narrative that verges on the world of gaming. This paper documents a pedagogical intervention carried out within the FanTALES project, which leverages creative writing and meaning-making practices from the digital wilds, in order to develop teaching and learning activities that engage secondary school learners in the writing of multilingual interactive fanfiction. Adolescent learners of English as a foreign language (N=21) wrote multilingual interactive fanfiction based on the digital game series Assassin's Creed. Qualitative content analysis of focus groups with these learners suggests that they experienced intrinsic motivation and developed skills in language and storytelling as well as transversal competences. They also dealt with a lowered sense of autonomy due to the open-endedness of the tasks, and struggled with a lack of sufficient knowledge about storytelling practices and the source text, as well as with project management. Potential improvements for the pedagogical implementation include more scaffolding of the tasks, and better integration with curriculum and assessment.

At a time when many language teachers are looking for research-based teaching materials that can be modified to support their students in online or digital learning, existing teaching and assessment materials developed through European grant-funded projects can provide valuable and ready-to-use resources. This paper reports on the published and forthcoming teaching materials developed by the FanTALES group for teaching multilingual interactive digital storytelling to low-to-high intermediate level learners, more specifically, the B1 level according to theCommon European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment.

This paper critically examines the integration of online fanfiction practices into an advanced university English language classroom. The fanfiction project, The Blogging Hobbit, was carried out as part of a course in the teacher education program at a Swedish university for students who were specializing in teaching English at the secondary school level. Participants were 122 students who completed the course in 2013 and 2014. In both classes, students were organized into groups of three to six to write collaborative blog-based role-play fanfiction of a missing moment from JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Hobbit. The 31 resulting pieces of collaborative fanfiction, the online formats they were published in, the 122 reflective essays produced by the two classes, and interviews with a focal group of participants were used to explore how technology and learners’ experience with this technology may have mediated the resulting stories. In addition, the classroom fanfiction texts were compared with comparable online writing published in the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (Ao3) to identify thematic and stylistic differences. The results showed that students’ lack of familiarity with publishing in blogs often posed a challenge that some groups were able to overcome or exploit to facilitate or enhance the readability of their completed stories. Compared to online fanfiction, the classroom fanfiction was less innovative with respect to focal characters yet more collective in its focus, with stories being told from multiple characters’ perspectives.

This book investigates various aspects of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) that address the challenges arising due to increasing learner and teacher mobility. The chapters deal with two broad areas, i.e. mobile technology for teacher and translator education and technology for mobile language learning. The authors allow for insights into how mobile learning activities can be used in educational settings by providing research on classroom practice. This book aims at helping readers gain a better understanding of the function and implementation of mobile technologies in local classroom contexts to support mobility, professional development, and language and culture learning.

Within the scope of technology for language education, fandom and online interest communities encompass a range of affinity groups in which individuals can develop skills and knowledge potentially supporting language learning or language mastery relevant to use in online and offline contexts. Initial work on online interest groups investigated individual and collaborative literacy practices and identity development among users of pre-Web 2.0 technologies such as Usenet discussions and personal fan websites. More recent research on online interest groups, language learning and use looks to the creative work and gameplay of international and multilingual users whose communities have flourished as a result of Web 2.0 technologies, including fanfiction archives, gaming forums, and wikis, and more general social media platforms. Altogether, studies of fandom and online interest groups within the area of language, education, and technology have revealed ways in which language learners and language users make use of these online communities for language learning, identity work, and the development of other skills and knowledge and which hold implications for the integration of technology and digital practices in language teaching.

The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning was conceived in response to the fact that technology has become integral to the ways that most language learners in the world today access materials in their second and foreign language, interact with others, learn in and out of the classroom, and take many language tests.

This article provides a narrative overview of research on online fan practices for language and literacy learning, use, and identity work. I begin with an introduction to online fan communities and common fan practices found in these online affinity spaces, the best known of which is fan fiction, fictional writing that reinterprets and remixes the events, characters, and settings found in popular media. I then look to other online fan practices that have been explored in language and literacy learning research such as fan-subbing and scanlation, amateur subtitling and translation of popular media carried out by individual or teams of fans. Finally, this article concludes by looking to research that has begun to explore the integration of fan practices found in the digital wilds into the language classroom as a way to illuminate how our growing understanding of online fan practices can motivate the design of computermediated tasks or the integration of social media into formal language teaching.