The aim of this personal reflection is to revisit the major concepts that have informed my academic research in the area of applied linguistics and second language development, and show how my overall pedagogical approach has evolved, thanks to the contribution of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT). The main focus of this paper is on the…

High-quality classroom dialogues improve students' capacities to learn school subjects and help them develop more general skills such as collaboration and critical thinking. In this chapter, we take a sociocultural stance toward learning and cognition. "Gap-closing" is used as a key concept to understand and explain why and how teachers…

According to Kasper (1992), L2 pragmatic knowledge affects all communicative acts. It can be described as the speaker's ability both to adapt linguistic formulae to social contextual constraints and to understand the implications of indirect utterances. The Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) describes pragmatic competence…

As familiar and widely used elements of second language pedagogy that can be leveraged in interesting new ways through the use of digital technology. The focus is on a set of affordances offered by Google Drive, a popular online storage and document-sharing technology. On the assumption that dynamic collaboration with peers, teacher feedback, and…

This paper captures and characterises the interplay between a group of student teachers' narratives of social network practice and their emergent professional practice with technologies. Teachers on an Initial Teacher Education programme in the UK spent a semester studying a module that synthesised university-based lectures with a professional…

With contributions from leading scholars, this compelling volume offers fresh insights into literacy teaching and learning--and the changing nature of literacy itself--in today's K-12 classrooms. The focus is on varied technologies and literacies such as social networking sites, text messaging, and online communities. Cutting-edge approaches to…

Describes research that used formative evaluation methods to examine synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems for online learning at the University of Hawaii. Discusses learner-centeredness, constructivism, and sociocultural theories that were used as the bases for the design of synchronous activities and recommends 10 desirable…

The number of children and adolescents accessing the Internet as well as the amount of time online are steadily increasing. The most common online activities include playing video games, accessing web sites, and communicating via chat rooms, email, and instant messaging. A theoretical framework for understanding the effects of Internet use on…

This paper is about the learning that happens in the synchronous text chat forum of on online group of English Language learners and tutors. It is a socioculturally oriented case study of an informal virtual community called "Webheads", who meet online in various places on the internet. Although dedicated to English Language learning, much other…

Social networking is one of the latest trends to evolve out of the growing online community. Social networking sites gather data submitted by members that is then stored as user profiles. The data or profiles can then be shared among the members of the site. Membership can be free or fee-based. A typical social networking site provides members…

This article discusses a framework for the development of tasks in a synchronous online environment used for language learning and teaching. It shows how a theoretical approach based on second language acquisition (SLA) principles, sociocultural and constructivist theories, and concepts taken from research on multimodality and new literacies, can…

In the Norwegian DoCTA and DoCTA NSS projects, we aimed to bring a theoretical perspective to the design of ICT-mediated learning environments that support the sociocultural aspects of human interaction and to evaluate their use. By taking a sociocultural perspective on learning activity focussing on the interpersonal social interaction in…