Much of traditional language learning takes place in the confined space of the physical classroom where interaction is somewhat limited to spoken communication with the teacher and the other students and engagement with written texts. New technologies have the potential to not only open up the classroom to new patterns of interaction and multimodal communication but also to link learners with the real world where language is not just a set of abstract concepts and rules but where it is actually used by speakers to make meaning. However, technologies are not neutral tools but have an impact on language learning and teaching.
This introduction sets out the core question that will be at the centre of this book, exploring the potential of the new digital technologies—which have afforded a move from the book and the page as well as the audio cassette to the screen and from unidirectional to bidirectional communication (Kress 2003)—to transform systems, approaches and processes commonly used in language learning and teaching and to examine the implications for learners, teachers and researchers. I will also introduce my theoretical approach, using complex systems theory (which is also referred to in the literature as dynamic systems theory, complexity theory/science or chaos theory/science) alongside sociocultural theory and the theory of multimodality to help answer this question. Following Cameron and Larsen-Freeman (2007), I will consider “the language classroom as a complex system, not reducible to its component parts, but in which the parts contribute to the whole while also being formed by the whole. A systems perspective can help understand language classroom problems and issues and suggest how to intervene to improve learning” (p. 236). However, while Cameron and Larsen-Freeman do so in the context of face-to-face language learning, I will be exploring online language learning and teaching, with a particular focus on the impact of the new digital media on interactive meaning-making in and beyond the classroom.
The use of digital technologies in language education has dramatically increased in recent years but books that use complex systems theory to explore their use are non-existent. Therefore the key significance of this book is that it brings together two areas which are of great interest to researchers and practitioners today but which have not yet sufficiently been explored in conjunction—online communication and meaning making in language learning and teaching contexts on the one hand and complex systems thinking on the other—in order to see how the new technologies are changing the language learning and teaching landscape.
The introduction ends with an overview of the chapters that make up this book.
1.1 Background: Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Digital media have greatly increased in significance for language learners and teachers in a relatively short time. This is reflected for example in the position statement of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (http://www.actfl.org/news/position-statements/role-technology-language-learning), which acknowledges the potential of technology as a tool to support and enhance classroom-based as well as distance language instruction and encourages its use. Similarly, “New media in language education” is one of the thematic areas of the European Centre for Modern Languages. They are “revolutionising the learning and teaching of languages” by providing access to authentic materials, enabling direct contact with others, and allowing us to find out and comment on what is happening in the world (https://www.ecml.at/Thematicareas/NewMediainLanguageEducation/tabid/1630/Default.aspx).
It is thus not surprising that the use of new technologies for language learning and teaching has become the focus of numerous books and myriads of journal articles as well as of a number of journals (including Language Learning & Technology (LLT), ReCALL, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), CALICO Journal, Innovations in Language Learning and Teaching, System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics, and JALTCALL). The number of books in the area has also been growing in the past decade. However, there are several key limitations to existing work. Firstly, much of the literature on computer-assisted language learning (CALL) shows that the teaching approaches used often continue to rely on cognitive theories of learning that have been questioned in the wake of the ‘social turn’ in second language acquisition (Block 2003). Secondly, many researchers work within a positivist research paradigm and/or follow a monomodal approach, generally exploring written or spoken language rather than considering the multimodal orchestration of meaning by learners. Thirdly, much of the work published is still not very strongly theorized, especially in the new and growing areas of learning beyond the classroom (as e.g. Wang and Winstead point out in their 2016 Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age). Furthermore, many of the books published in this area are edited books which are well suited to giving an excellent overview of an area but are less able to examine a subject in greater depth.
This book is based on an understanding of the language classroom that is informed by ecological, semiotic and sociocultural principles that encourage participation and interaction. It is within the tradition of research which shows that language learning goes beyond developing the ability to compute input and produce output—a view still held by many teachers as well as researchers. As Young in his Series Editor’s Foreword to Seedhouse (2004, p. xi) remarks:
The notion of learning as increasing participation in social activity is clearly a very different view of second language development from the cognitive one, but if we adopt the participation metaphor for learning, the relevance of social context becomes clear, and the central question in SLA [Second Language Acquisition] becomes understanding the organization of talk—direct interaction between persons—as the primordial site of sociality.
Thus I will focus on how learners use language to try and make meaning, on the importance of socialization through and into a language. Lam and Kramsch (2003, p. 5) point to the metaphor of ecology “to capture the interconnectedness of the psychological, social and environmental processes in SLA”. And linking into this, Larsen-Freeman (2016) argues for “the need to move beyond input-output metaphors to embrace a new way of understanding, one informed by Complexity Theory with its ecological orientation – one of affordances.” This book puts the focus squarely on the affordances that new technologies have for communication and meaning-making. However, I am focusing not just on communication through the spoken word but will also include other modes of communication such as writing and gesture, which have often been neglected in applied linguistics research of language learners’ interactions.
A growing number of key applied linguistics researchers (such as Diane Larsen-Freeman, Kees de Bot, Marjolijn Verspoor, Anne Burns and Sarah Mercer) started to use complex systems theory in the early 2000s. More recently, interest in this area seems to have accelerated, as evidenced in an increase in articles and edited books (e.g. Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2009; Housen et al. 2012; Ortega and Han 2017). However, most of the research published so far focuses on second language development of learners. An exception to this is Larsen-Freeman and Cameron’s 2008 book Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics (Oxford, OUP), which uses complex systems theory to explore a range of areas in applied linguistics more generally.
1.2 The Disruptive Potential of New Technologies
In 1999 Roger Säljö posed the following question about the impact of the new information technolog...