Blogging and language learning

Blogs can provide teachers and learners with a tool that is very easy to set up and that provides a space where they can interact and practise language use. Considering blogs in education generally, Will Richardson points out that blogging means linking to content, analyzing and synthesizing that content, and writing for real readers, with […]

Digital Game-based Language Learning

The emergence of digital games has elevated game-based language learning to a new level. Recently the role of digital games in language learning has aroused the attention of both language researchers and game designers who put effort into providing appropriate pedagogical support to maximize learning in gaming environments. A study of the relationship between digital […]

Popular Media Forms in Language Learning

Purushotma’s (2005) paper argues how important the new term “edutainment” is to educators teaching adolescent students. It has been largely explored to achieve educational goals within entertainment content (e.g.: the applications of online games, music videos, typing tutors, etc.). The author provides a case from her own experience of language learning. With the memorization of […]

L2 Identity Through Writing on the Internet

The paper that we are going to introduce is a case study which focuses on a teenage Chinese immigrant in the United States, Almon. The study looks at how Almon communicates on the Internet in a transnational group of J-pop fans and how this translates into his identity formation. It also draws on critical questions […]

CMC in L2 Teaching

CMC, Computer mediated communication, is widely used in language teaching today. According to Abrams (2012), the way students communicate when using CMC differs from their face-to-face interactions. L2 learners become more independent and rely less on instructors. In addition, students who practice oral and written chat through computer perform better than other peers. In this […]

Virtual spaces and foreign language learning

According to Stevenson and Liu (2010), foreign language learning websites provide an interactive platform for people to acquire new languages through online communications. Language learning websites create collaborative communities for people from different countries to communicate. The most intriguing feature is that users can learn new foreign languages and meanwhile teach their native language through […]

Online Fanfiction in Language Learning

Fanfiction is writing in which fans use media narratives and pop cultural icons as inspiration for creating their own texts.(Black, 2006, p.172) Rebecca W. Black conducted a case study about a girl named Nanako, a native Mandarin Chinese speaker who had moved from China to Canada. When she first arrived in Canada, she struggled with […]

Blogs in language education

According to Rebecca Blood, the weblog (or ‘blog’ for short) is the first ‘native’ genre of the internet (follow this link if you want to see a good video of what blogging is all about). If you think about it, blogs fundamentally change the way that we read and write. They provide people with the […]

Getting started: Building a learning community online

Now is an exciting part of the semester: we’ve gotten off to a good start and are ready to explore the world of new literacies and language learning. As Graham Stanley points out in his book Language Learning with Technology, for online learning to work effectively, it’s important to build the right kind of supportive […]