Guest editorial: digital language learning and teaching: practices and perspectives

This special issue presents digital practices and perspectives that focus on developing L2 vocabulary, enhancing different features of L2 oral performance and intercultural communication, promoting learner engagement and motivation, and providing feedback. The studies are set in a range of geographical and cultural contexts, and use a variety of research methodologies to investigate different technology-mediated tools for foreign language teaching and learning, including WhatsApp, Zoom, Moodle, massively multiplayer online games, audio-visual and multimodal materials such as TV series, and gamification.

The beginning of the 21st century has ushered in the ‘digital age’, and the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies of communication in education has provided foreign language learners with new multimodal opportunities for informal and formal language learning. Language learners in general, and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in particular, are increasingly able to interact, and share their cultures with, other learners all over the world. Digital opportunities for learners to use and practise the target language include downloading music and videos online from YouTube or TED Talks, using podcasting applications, interacting through social and educational networking sites and applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Edmodo, and Google Classroom, and using language learning apps such as Duolingo.

Despite the potential availability of this plethora of digital communication and learning resources, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–22 brought unprecedented challenges to education, forcing learners worldwide to continue their study at home and online, regardless of the quality of their Internet access, and their level of digital skill and that of their educators. This experience has led to a deeper understanding of how digital resources can effectively be used in education, and it has also shed light on issues arising from our increased connectivity, such as plurilingualism and translanguaging. Accordingly, as argued by Oikonomou and Patsala (2021), it has become vital to integrate digital tools into language education, including software, programmes, applications, platforms, online or offline resources, incorporating text, audio and visual information, and used with computers, mobile devices or other digital devices. Additionally, Bećirović (2023) assures that, exploiting the range of fast-developing digital technologies represents the future of education, and a cornerstone for educational reform. Educational institutions thus need to embrace digital transformation to meet the needs of today’s students, the ‘digital natives’, and prepare them for the digital world in which they will be – indeed, are already – learning, working and socialising.

Organisation of this special issue

This special issue brings together eight research articles which investigate a range of uses of digital resources, all seeking to make language education as authentic, as effective and as responsive to individual learner needs as possible. Specific aspects focused on include multimodality and digital gaming for reinforcing vocabulary learning, promoting oral language performance, providing tailored feedback, and improving intercultural exchange.

Available technologies now provide easy access – anywhere, any time – to a wealth of authentic material in the target language, which has great potential for language learning. However, we still need to extend our knowledge of how such language contexts can be used to maximize the benefit for the language learner. The article by Anastasia Pattemore and Carmen Muñoz presents a study on viewing target language captioned TV series and investigates the effects of different spacing of this multimodal input viewing. Different viewing distributions were implemented with a total of 96 L1 Russian students with a wide range of EFL proficiency. The participants all watched five episodes, but three different viewing distribution conditions were compared: longer spacing of viewing once per week; shorter spacing of viewing once per day; and massed binge-watching of all the episodes in one session. Taking into account the three distinct variables studied (viewing condition, proficiency and feeling of learning), Pattemore and Muñoz found that all participants gained knowledge of the target multi-word expressions, but those in the longer spacing condition benefitted the most. Pattemore and Muñoz’ results caution against binge-watching for language learning purposes – although this should not dissuade viewers from binge-watching for the purposes of entertainment! While this research study was carried out in an in-class context, its conclusions are obviously relevant to language learning outside the classroom and can easily be applied by anyone wanting to learn useful target language expressions from multimodal input in the shape of movies or series: it’s better in reasonable doses!

Digital technologies have undoubtedly created new opportunities for language learners. Nasser Jabbari and Mark Peterson also investigate the potential of informal and entertainment-oriented language practice in their study of massively multiplayer online gaming (MMOG) and its impact on EFL oral performance. Their mixed-methods case study examines the speaking performance of six EFL Iranian gamers in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency, over the course of six months’ regular gaming in World of Warcraft. It also looks at the gamers’ perceptions of how using the MMOG helped them develop their oral EFL skills. The participants played in two teams comprising three EFL gamers (grouped by proficiency) and (the same) native speaker. The researchers used PRAAT software to analyse the naturally occurring in-game conversation, and also drew on data from the gamers’ reflective journals, and post-study semi-structured interviews. They found improvements in EFL speaking performance in 50% of the CAF indices. In particular, gaming was found to promote oral fluency. The gamers themselves noted that the positive socio-affective environment – a kind of ‘in-game community of practice’ – along with time pressure and associated need to communicate quickly and clearly to other members of the team in order to succeed in the game, helped them develop greater fluency in English.

The design of games thus obviously impacts on L2 gamers’ linguistic behaviours and on their developing L2 skills (Reinhardt 2021). Important factors here include the nature of the language used in the game and how it is presented, the opportunities for interaction and feedback, and how the game encourages user engagement. The article by Ya Gao and Lin Pan focuses on analysing ‘gamification’ features in two EFL vocabulary learning applications widely used by Asian learners—BaiCiZhan and Perfect Lingo – using the ‘mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics’ (MDA) model adapted from Ruhi’s (2015) MDA framework for gamification applications. According to this model, designers set up the basic elements and rules (mechanics) of the game, which trigger interaction between players and the game system (dynamics) leading players to experience various emotions (aesthetics). Gao and Lin then use this framework to gather learners’ evaluations of the various ‘gamified’ features in the two apps, based on observations and interviews. They conclude that such mobile vocabulary learning applications are found to be more helpful when they present words in a multimodal way, contain more meaningful practice, adopt social interaction to enhance learning outcomes, and reward learners with in-kind incentives.

As Matthew Pattemore and Roger Gilabert note in their article, ‘[d]igital games have great advantages as language learning spaces: they are inherently motivational, input rich, provide individual attention and support to the learner-player  … ’ Their study uses eye tracking to understand how a group of 11-year-old Spanish learners of EFL used different kinds of feedback as they engaged in a pedagogic digital game which required learners to supply a correct grammatical form in order to advance through the game world. Pattemore and Gilabert were interested to see if there were any differences in the processing and effect of informational versus metalinguistic elaborative feedback, provided in auditory mode. The informational feedback provided guidance about how to arrive at the correct answer (for example, ‘think about when the events in the two parts of the sentence took place’) while the metalinguistic feedback gave indications about the target grammatical structure. Although no significant differences were found in learner responses to the two types of feedback and their impact on error recovery, the data did demonstrate that they were processed differently. For example, it seems that when students paid attention to the informational feedback and reviewed the question, they found it useful for error correction.

Given the prominence of online teaching over the last few years, mobile instant messaging (MIM) has grown in importance for students studying languages either entirely outside of class or as a complement to in-class work in a blended approach. Applications such as WhatsApp have the potential to provide a group of language learners with opportunities for language practice and almost immediate feedback from a teacher. The article by Bridget Murphy and her colleagues investigates the experience of a group of adult upper intermediate EFL learners as they received corrective feedback in a WhatsApp group, as part of their blended English course. Over five weeks, students completed weekly grammar exercises from which errors were selected by the teacher. They were then asked to correct these via WhatsApp group chat, followed by teacher feedback. On one set of exercises, feedback was given ‘during task’ (within 24 hours) while on another similar set, it was ‘delayed’ for several days. Feedback in the ‘during task’ modality typically comprised prompts towards the correct answer, starting from more implicit and moving to more explicit. Students’ perceptions of the two feedback modalities were examined through semi-structured online interviews and a questionnaire. Results showed that students were more responsive to, more successful at, and preferred, the ‘during-task’ feedback. In particular, they appreciated repairing their own errors in response to increasingly explicit prompts.

A broadly similar graduated approach to learner support in a digital context is investigated in Ehsan Rassaei’s study. In this paper, the focus is on ‘dynamic’ glosses; in other words, gradually more explicit glosses designed to provide learners with optimal support for understanding and learning unknown vocabulary in a reading text. Rassaei compares traditional glosses (just comprising a definition) with dynamic glosses in audio or text mode, looking at their impact on the learning of unknown words. A straightforward vocabulary post-test was used, assessing whether participants could identify a correct translation for the target words, but Rassaei also introduces a computer-based ‘dynamic assessment’ tool where, depending on their responses, participants received a series of prompts, from implicit to explicit, to help them find the correct answer. Scores were allocated depending on how easily participants managed to identify the correct translation for the target words. Rassaei argues from a sociocultural perspective that this simple programme allows for assessment of the learner’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky 1978), or how much mediation they need to get to a correct answer. Rassaei’s results confirm that, first, glosses do help vocabulary learning, as all treatment groups outperformed the control group. However, dynamic glossing, both text- and audio-based, proved even more effective than traditional glosses, and text-based dynamic glosses emerged as the most effective in this study. Rassaei argues that dynamic glosses engage learners in greater cognitive processing and assign a more agentive role to learners during the vocabulary learning activity. Here, the digital context is able to mirror – at least to some extent – how an ‘expert’ might work one-to-one with a ‘novice’ to enable them to learn unknown material.

The special issue closes with two articles that offer a rather different perspective on foreign language education, highlighting the significance of digital environments for promoting plurilingualism and translanguaging. In a globalised multilingual world, languages rarely function in total isolation from each other, and – particularly in our digitalised communication contexts - language is but one mode of communication. This awareness has brought about a shift in foreign language education, broadening its scope beyond ‘monolingualism that concentrates on using only the target language, correcting errors, and eradicating interference’ (García and Otheguy 2019) to focus on ‘plurilingualism that emphasises interculturality and the intricacy of interaction and highlights the multimodal language practices of plurilingual speakers’ (Vallejo and Dooly 2020). The notions of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism have recently emerged due to linguistic diversity and interculturality and the need to nurture language learners as social agents who can communicate and interact flexibly and dynamically in multilingual and multicultural contexts (Cifone Ponte 2022).

Central to plurilingualism is the concept of ‘repertoire’ which emphasises an individual’s set of communication resources (e.g. linguistic, cultural, semiotic) and recognises the multiple modalities that communication may entail, including the use of a range of known languages, along with gestures and body language, images, and non-linguistic auditory input. Recognition of the range of technologies available to support the construction of meaning and the establishment of mutual understanding is also significant. Plurilingual pedagogy aims to promote the learner’s plurilingual and pluricultural repertoire and encourage multimodal hybrid languaging practices through the use of strategies such as translanguaging, intercomprehension, the comparison of languages for learning purposes, and cross-cultural awareness(Galante 2022; Vallejo and Dooly 2020).

Angelica Galante and her colleagues report in their article on a multiple case study of digital plurilingual pedagogy using Zoom in three synchronous online foreign language courses (the respective target languages were English, Spanish, and French). The researchers and collaborating teachers were particularly interested in how to promote their Brazilian adult learners’ oral engagement in Zoom classes. Five plurilingual strategies were deployed, comprising cross-linguistic comparisons, cross-cultural comparisons, translanguaging, translation for mediation, and pluriliteracies. The results of this case study, based on classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with the teachers, revealed that multimodal digital plurilingual pedagogy using semiotic resources such as GIFs, emojis, and other nonlinguistic resources, facilitated students’ willingness to speak in the online classes and enhanced plurilingual and pluricultural awareness beyond geographical boundaries. As students started to see themselves as ‘plurilingual’ speakers - rather than as having a deficit in the target language - they felt empowered to contribute more actively.

Paralleling the growth in global student mobility, alongside the normalisation of digital communication, telecollaboration and virtual exchanges (VEs) have emerged as powerful FL pedagogic formats that can facilitate intercultural exchange among language learners in geographically distant classrooms (Barbosa and Ferreira-Lopes 2023; Dooly and Vallejo 2020; O'Dowd 2015). Telecollaboration involves bringing language learners in different countries together in a digital space for the development of foreign language skills and intercultural communicative competence (O'Dowd 2015). Learners typically engage in online collaborative tasks and project work, dialogic and shared knowledge-building, and reflection on learning processes (Dooly 2017; Dooly and Vinagre 2021).

While telecollaboration is clearly of great value to any intercultural curriculum, the challenge is how to incorporate telecollaborative competencies into teacher education and provide teachers with effective training on implementing VEs as part of intercultural curricula (Eren 2023; O'Dowd 2015). In our final article, Euline Schmid, Anita Kienle, and Hilal Şahin report on a study investigating how a technology-mediated plurilingual programme influenced the professional growth of German EFL teachers’ pedagogical and digital skills in designing and applying plurilingual-inspired virtual exchange activities. The researchers used classroom observations, field notes, recordings of teacher reflective activities, as well as focus group and individual interviews with teachers, to gather data. The case study demonstrates how the programme helped teachers re-evaluate their monolingual ideologies and fostered important pedagogical and digital skills, including the understanding of tools and platforms suitable for VEs, how to create and modify curriculum materials for a VE project, and how to manage the sometimes daunting logistics of a VE project. The researchers advocate incorporating such technology-mediated plurilingual approaches into foreign language education as a way to address issues of linguistic insecurity and, echoing Galante et al.’s study, to facilitate oral development in the target language.

Final words

In conclusion, this issue provides insights into digital practices in foreign language teaching and learning by presenting current research in this field and its practical applications. We hope it offers inspiration for teachers who would like to implement multimodality, digital gaming, and plurilingualism in their foreign language teaching practices, and encourages language educators to exploit the potential of digital resources for providing support and feedback tailored to the individual learner’s needs. It is obviously not easy to speculate realistically about how digital practices will evolve in the future, but the studies reported here highlight useful directions for further research and development that should help us exploit digital environments more effectively for foreign language learning and teaching.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to Elspeth Broady and Norbert Pachler at The Language Learning Journal for their generosity, support and savoir faire throughout the process of compiling this special issue. Last but not least, we would like to thank all of the authors and the reviewers for their valuable contributions.