Research on online discourse has found that computer-mediated communication (CMC) such as e-mail and text-chat exhibit features of both speech and writing (Danet & Herring, 2007). Such differences reflect the influence of contextual, social and technological factors on language practices (Androutsopoulos, 2006). A prominent contextual factor found in the computer-enhanced language classroom is the type of task learners engage in using CMC. Research on L2 performance within the complexity-accuracy-fluency (CAF) framework has found that task characteristics and task conditions exert a systematic influence on learners’ linguistic choices (Skehan, 2001). Accordingly, this study uses exploratory corpus-based techniques to compare the spoken and written features found in L2 learner text-chat output produced under two task conditions: on-task and off-task text-chat. The chatscripts analyzed in the present study were generated during text-chat interactions produced by 30 adult high intermediate and advanced Swedish university learners of English paired with US English speakers. Pairs met online for two 20 minute sessions to completed two collaborative writing tasks. After completing the task, participants used any remaining time to continue chatting. On-task chat was operationalized as chat turns bounded by task opening (e.g. Shall we begin?) and task closing sequences (e.g. That was all of my words.). Off-task chat was operationalized as chat turns preceding task opening sequences and chat turns following task closing sequences. Chatscripts were split to separate ‘on-task interaction’ from ‘off-task interaction’, in order to obtain two corpora representative of the language produced in these different conditions. On-task and off-task interaction were compared using the corpus-based techniques key-word analysis (Scott 1997) and concordancing. Analysis revealed intriguing differences in the relative use of features related to speech (e.g. first and second person pronouns, inserts) and writing (e.g. subordinators, stance adverbs) in the two task conditions.

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.

The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning presents a comprehensive exploration of the impact of technology on the field of second language learning. The rapidly evolving language-technology interface has propelled dramatic changes in, and increased opportunities for, second language teaching and learning. Its influence has been felt no less keenly in the approaches and methods of assessing learners' language and researching language teaching and learning. Contributions from a team of international scholars make up the Handbook consisting of four parts: language teaching and learning through technology; the technology-pedagogy interface; technology for L2 assessment; and research and development of technology for language learning. It considers how technology assists in all areas of language development, the emergence of pedagogy at the intersection of language and technology, technology in language assessment, and major research issues in research and development of technologies for language learning. It covers all aspects of language including grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, listening, speaking, pragmatics, and intercultural learning, as well as new pedagogical and assessment approaches, and new ways of conceiving and conducting research and development. The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning demonstrates the extensive, multifaceted implications of technology for language teachers, learners, materials-developers, and researchers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper asks whether computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has an English problem. It surveys the empirical studies published in four English language international CALL journals during the 4-year period (2012–2015) to see whether there was an upward trend in the overall number and proportion of studies investigating English as a target language. For 2012 and 2013, the proportion of English to studies of other languages was roughly equal. But published studies on English in 2014 and 2015 showed a noticeable increase. It then explores three cases in which an overemphasis on English fails to capture the cognitive and social issues around the use of technology for learning and teaching other languages. These include, for instance, the cognitive complexity of typing in character-based languages relative to typing in alphabetic languages, the culturally situated nature of feedback made available to learners using writing software, and teachers of languages other than English questioning the relevance of CALL for their local context. CALL journals both represent and shape the field, and when the vast majority of studies published in prominent international CALL journals explore primarily English as the target language, it may suggest that computer-assisted language learning is becoming synonymous with computer-assisted English learning.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is person-to-person communication that takes place via a range of computer-supported transmission technologies that enable both synchronous real-time and asynchronous interaction across different modalities. Thus, CMC encompasses such technologies as e-mail and text chat, blogs, vlogs (video blogs), bulletin boards and voice boards, and Web sites and wikis (a series of interconnected Web pages). Within language learning contexts, certain types of CMC are more prevalent, and accordingly research on language development that occurs during and through CMC reflects this tendency.

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 present study builds upon research in the CAF (complexity, accuracy, fluency) framework for examining learner performance to compare the lexical and syntactic complexity of learner output in spoken discourse and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) during completion of narrative tasks. Data were generated from transcripts and video-enhanced chatscripts for (N = 21) university learners of English from linguistically, educationally and digitally diverse backgrounds. Results revealed no significant difference in either the lexical or syntactic complexity of the narratives generated in these two modalities and instead found evidence that different types of learners in this heterogenous population were able to generate more complex language predominantly in one context over the other.

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.

This study reports on intercultural learning during telecollaboration from the perspective of student participants in a five-country online teacher education partnership. The student perspectives reported here were drawn from one intact class in the partnership, five students who completed this partnership as part of a sociolinguistics course in a secondary school English teacher education program in Sweden. Offline, the telecollaboration served as a discussion point for course themes and as data for a study on a sociolinguistic topic carried out by each student. Findings revealed intercultural learning occurred in three situations: as a result of in-class conflict during discussion of the telecollaboration, through analysis of interactional styles found in the online discussion posts for the sociolinguistics study, and through online discussion with peers in other countries regarding educational practices.

Mark Warschauer (born 1954) is a US scholar and researcher, known for his work on technology in language and literacy education. His research explores the pedagogical applications of technology for second language (L2) learning, the social and educational dimensions and implications of digital literacy, and the use of technology to foster learning and empowerment. He has conducted research in the United States in elementary and secondary schools, and among adult learners in technology-enhanced learning contexts in several countries, including Egypt, the United States, and the Czech Republic.

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.

The chapters included in the Handbook paint a picture of important advances in technologies that have resulted in fundamental changes in language teaching and learning. By focusing up close on the learning activities, their development, and research investigating them, the papers in the Handbook depict some of the possibilities and excitement in a new generation of second language teaching. In this final chapter, we synthesize the main messages of the chapters into one that indicates that technology has arrived in the lives of language learners. After examining the implications of the arrival of technology and inspired by themes found in the science‐fiction television series Star Trek, we look to the future to speculate on language teaching issues to come with expanded technology use by expanding learner populations.

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 study builds upon work in task-based language teaching and literary studies to explore the use of fan fiction as a pedagogical tool in a technology-enhanced university foreign language class. A task-based fan fiction project, The Blogging Hobbit, modelled on blog-based role-play storytelling found in online media fandoms, was carried out in a first-year university course for undergraduate learners of English who were also training to become secondary school English teachers in Sweden. Students were organized into groups, in which each member was responsible for voicing a single character from Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit in a blog-based collaborative role-play of a missing moment from the story. Findings revealed that carefully sequenced collaborative fan fiction could facilitate analysis of a literary text, learners’ use of creative writing techniques, and language development, particularly at the level of lexis.

Digital communication technologies both complexify and help to reveal the dynamics of human communicative activity and capacity for identity performance. Addressing current scholarship on second language use and development, this review article examines research on identity in digital settings either as a design element of educational practice or as a function of participation in noninstitutionally located online cultures. We also address new frontiers and communication in the digital wilds, as it were, and here we focus on cultural production in fandom sites and the processes of transcultural authoring and community building visible in these settings.