Multilingual Computer Assisted Language Learning

Judith Buendgens-Kosten, Daniela Elsner

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788921473
• eBook ISBN: 9781788921503
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

Recent developments in education, such as the increasing linguistic diversity in school populations and the digital revolution which has led to new ways of being, learning and socialising, have brought about fresh challenges and opportunities. In response, this book shows how technology enriches multilingual language learning, as well as how multilingual practices enrich computer assisted language learning (CALL) by bringing together two, thus far distinct, fields of research: CALL and multilingual approaches to language learning. The collection includes contributions from researchers and practitioners from three continents to illustrate how native languages, previously studied languages, heritage languages or dialects are activated through technology in formal and informal learning situations. The studies in this book showcase multilingual language use in chat rooms, computer games, digital stories, ebook apps, online texts and telecollaboration/virtual exchange via interactive whiteboards. This volume will be of interest to researchers interested in language learning and teaching and to practitioners looking for support in seizing the opportunities presented by the multilingual, digital classroom.

Part 1

Multiliteracies and MCALL

1The Multiple Languages of Digital Communication

Wolfgang Hallet

The Cultural Need to Communicate in Multiple Languages

The notion of multilingualism traditionally refers to a multiplicity of verbal languages in which individuals are proficient and which are used or co-present in discursive and social interaction. A large number of societal and cultural factors have led to a growing diversification of the languages in everyday communication and in almost all cultural domains. In light of more recent European and worldwide tendencies of a return to nation-state policies and nationalized thinking, the obvious needs to be restated: migration (forced and free) and globalization have made it almost impossible to communicate solely in the native language any longer. Jobs and employees move freely across Europe and other continents, and even smaller companies often operate globally or Europe-wide so that the world of work has clearly become multilingual. The same applies to public communication and the circulation of knowledge or content of all kind, and of popular cultural artifacts in particular. Media corporations operate globally; TV channels, the film industry, streaming portals and the world wide web in general have made it possible to communicate everything in almost any language globally, so that anyone who is proficient in the language of the content that they would like to access (a Spanish website, a French feature film or an American TV show, for example) is able to do so, no matter where they are located. The same applies to the domain of education and knowledge production. In many educational institutions, the national language is no longer the only medium of instruction and scientific knowledge; moreover, due to cultural multilingualism (as is the case in countries such as Switzerland, Northern Italy and Luxembourg) the education system as a whole is multilingual. Last but not least, people seek refuge across states and continents or decide to migrate, and people’s personal lives have become more mobile. Travelling has become an almost natural part of people’s private lives so that they experience the need to communicate in a foreign language in their own personal lives.

To summarize: the need to educate multilingual citizens (or ‘multilingual subjects’, as Claire Kramsch [2010] terms them) is not simply a pedagogically desirable goal, but it is a response to cultural developments represented by all of these processes of migratory, cultural and economic globalization and is therefore a pressing educational issue (Elsner et al., 2013: 57). However, all of the processes sketched above are not only characterized by the use of different languages, often in the same communicative or institutional context. They have also produced, or at least go hand in hand with, new ways and modes to communicate. The internet has enhanced the spread of other symbolic languages, and visual languages (diagrammatic, photographic, filmic, etc.) in particular, and communication in general has become diversified in terms of the sign systems that are routinely used. This is why this chapter argues that the concept of language needs to be extended beyond the system of linguistic signs in order to account for the large number of other symbolic languages that are used in everyday communication, and in digital environments in particular. These other symbolic languages and semiotic modes can be considered languages in their own right that engage in specific ways of making meaning, either on their own or in combination with each other and the verbal language (multimodality). In a semiotic approach, the large potential and the chances that the use of linguistic and non-linguistic sign systems offer in multilingual environments and all processes of meaning-making needs to be investigated. In such an approach, second and foreign languages are conceived of as semiotic resources and modes of meaning-making, among a large range of other semiotic modes. One of the conclusions that will be addressed concerns the need to incorporate the acquisition of other non-verbal literacies into language learning in order to equip learners with the symbolic resources that are required in multimodal and multilingual acts of communication and develop their semiotic competence, or ‘symbolic power’ (Kramsch, 2010: 13–14). In that sense, all language learning is almost ‘naturally’ bound to be ‘multilingual’.

Digital Communication: From ‘Language’ to ‘Literacies’

In the domain of teaching and learning languages, communicating content between interlocutors in given situations and interactions is the core of the use of language and of all language learning. What, then, do we do with digital types and forms of communication that are inherent to the utterance itself? Examples of such digital communicative forms are the combination of a photograph and a small story on one of the instant messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram), an explainer video on a video platform, but also an electronic slide that may combine verbal text, an image and sound in a single ‘text’ (the slide).

Since the digital texts in these examples are quite distinct and generically different from each other (e.g. the digital story and the explanatory text), subsuming all of them under ‘media’ doesn’t appear to be a particularly appropriate way of conceptualizing or categorizing them. In any case, it is not helpful in terms of a concept of language learning. On the other hand, as a result of its implementation in the federal educational standards for foreign languages, ‘media’ is a category and an explanatory framework that is widely used in pedagogical theories, and ‘media competence’ (Medienkompetenz) has become the most popular and widespread pedagogical concept in Germany on which everybody in the field draws as a standard rationale applied to (or imposed on) all aspects of foreign language learning (e.g. KMK, 2012: 22–23). However, ‘media’ is an extremely broad and abstract concept that can mean anything and everything: the feature film, the internet, the graphic novel, the tablet, the email, the smartphone, the photograph, the tweet – all of these are counted under media, although, obviously, the term encompasses a wide range of inconsistent categories. As the examples demonstrate, ‘media’ may refer to the artifact or ‘text’ as well as to the technical device or to the channel that carries the signs; it may refer to the hardware as well as the software; and it may denote a whole media system (e.g. ‘the press’) as well as a single learning device like the electronic dictionary. On the other hand, pen and paper (‘old media’, as it were) or the printed book don’t really come to mind when the notion of ‘media’ is used, although they obviously are part of the (‘old’) media system. Most likely, no one would argue that reading a novel enhances ‘media competence’ – whereas a feature film is supposed to do so. That’s why ‘media competence’ is not particularly apt to grasp the phenomena that one needs to focus upon in the contexts of teaching and learning languages.

To summarize: technologies in themselves do not ‘naturally’ affect or transform language learning processes and interactions, nor do they enhance them, unless this transformation is pedagogically conceptualized and put into practice. As David Buckingham (2009) argues:

We need to move beyond the idea that technology has consequences in and of itself. There may indeed be great creative, educational and democratic potential here; but whether that potential is realized depends on how the technology is used, and on the social relationships that are constructed around it. We need to think creatively about the new forms of educational practice, and the new forms of community, which can make this happen. Technology in itself will not make children creative, nor will it motivate or enable them to learn. Children need to develop specific skills both in using software and hardware, and in more ‘traditional’ areas of literacy and artistic expression, if the potential is to be realized. (Buckingham, 2009: 138)

This critique of ‘media’ as a category and of computer or technology-oriented concepts in language learning is, of course, not meant to deny or ignore the valuable, often innovative proposals and contributions that have been made by them in the field of learning and teaching languages. On the contrary, historically and methodologically, they were the first and the most productive approaches that accounted for the role of what used to be (and sometimes is still) called ‘the new media’. However, since digital technology is no longer one factor among others or a single phenomenon, but has instead become a whole, omnipresent dimension of everyday life that affects everybody’s ways of thinking, communicating and doing, and society as a whole as well as the social lives of individuals, ‘digitalization’ must be reconceptualized as a dimension of school education. It is not a factor that is additional or external to acts of communication and to language learning. Rather, digitalization has become inherent to the use and acquisition of languages, no matter whether they are native, second or foreign: to a great extent, communication itself has taken on a digital form; a large number of communicative acts are digital themselves and occur in electronic environments. This is why digital acts of discourse and digital formats of communication – digital modes and genres, the digital languages – need to be taught and learned in the language classroom.

The emergence of new multimedia technologies, of the digitalization of communication and of the electronic hypertext in particular, has therefore made it most urgent to account for the combination of different symbolic forms in displays and environments in which ‘meaning’ can no longer be explained as resulting from the use of the natural human language alone. In digital communication, the contribution of other codes and sign systems such as sound and music, maps and diagrams, photographs and moving images, is most obvious and almost standard:

Multimodal production is now a ubiquitous fact of representation and communication. That forces us urgently to develop precise tools requisite for the description and analysis of texts and semiotic entities of contemporary communication. (Kress, 2010: 102)

Therefore, theories not only of cultural semiosis and communication, but also of language learning and of multilingualism must explain and describe how meaning is made across (and simultaneously through) a variety of different semiotic systems, semiotic and generic modes (carried by different ‘media’ and placed in different medial environments, digital media among them), and how a combination of all of these modes and media is able to produce one integrated, or even coherent and more or less conventionalized meaning.

Multiliteracies pedagogy (The New London Group, 2000) has responded to both, the fundamental cultural changes delineated in the first section of this chapter, and the need for a new pedagogy in light of these sociocultural and economic changes. Therefore, the purpose of the multiliteracies pedagogy is twofold:

First, we want to extend the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalised societies; to account for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate. Sec...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Multilingual CALL: Introduction
• Part 1: Multiliteracies and MCALL
• Part 2: Multilingual Texts
• Part 3: Intercomprehension and CALL
• Part 4: Multilingual Online Exchange and Telecollaboration
• Part 5: MCALL and Professional Development of Teachers
• Concluding Remarks
• Learning in Multilingually and Digitally Mediated Spaces: The MCALL Approach
• Index