The use of digital exhibitions in two advanced language and culture courses within a liberal arts curriculum provides an innovative pedagogical approach to promoting language learning and critical analysis. This article proposes a pedagogy to incorporate Maker-Centered Learning (MCL), the framework that emerged from a Harvard Graduate School of…

Research into the online informal learning of English (OILE) examines how nonnative speakers of English may develop L2 skills through participation in leisure activities on the Internet in the target language. Such activities include, e.g., watching television series, films, or videos, interacting on Facebook, reading articles, or listening to…

In recent years scholars have explored the use of mobile devices as potential sources for language learning and teaching. Mobile phones and tablets, especially, have been researched with a focus on effectively building vocabulary primarily among university-level students. Comparable research in other age groups has not been as widespread. This…

Social presence is considered an important quality in computer-mediated communication as it promotes willingness in learners to take risks through participation in interpersonal exchanges (Kehrwald, 2008) and makes communication more natural (Lowenthal, 2010). While social presence has mostly been investigated through questionnaire data and…

This case study examines students' experiences regarding the infusion of digital storytelling in their high school fourth-year Spanish class. The aim of this case study is to determine if digital storytelling can be an effective tool for language learners to communicate emotion and present information to an audience. Sources of information for…

English language learners in the United States and abroad have begun to utilize Facebook, a social networking site, which since its inception in 2004 has been extremely popular with American college students. This qualitative case study with participants from an intensive English program in the US explores seven ESOL students' motivations for…

The potential of computer-mediated communication (CMC) for language learning resides mainly in the possibility that learners have to engage with other speakers of the language, including L1 speakers. The inclusion of CMC in the L2 classroom provides an opportunity for students to utilize authentic language in real interaction, rather than the more…

Blended learning, a combination of face-to-face and online instruction, is seen as one of the most important recent advances in education (Thorne, 2003). While previous CALL studies have looked at various aspects of blended learning in foreign and second language classes, they have not allowed for a sufficient description of what actually happens…

This study aims to verify the effectiveness of English language materials using mobile devices for business people in terms of the effect on motivation, overall learning performance, and practical performance in real business situations. We compared the use of materials developed from business English for a sales department in a company…

The qualitative study reported in this article explored the use of technology for language learning in a third-year French class at a public university in the Midwest of the USA. To address the need for a more holistic study of technology for language learning (Basharina, 2007; Thorne, 2003), an Activity Theory framework was employed to…

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of feedback that English as a Second Language (ESL) students received on their writings either from an automated essay scoring (AES) system or from the teacher. The participants were 12 adult ESL students who were attending an intensive English center at a university in Florida. The drafts of the…

This case study focuses on two learners who took part in an intensive online German course offered to intermediate level students in the Department of Languages of the Open University. The course piloted the use of a Moodle-based virtual learning environment and a range of new online tools which lend themselves to different types of language…

In a project-based approach to teaching a foreign language at the university level, students are often required to participate in several task-based writing activities. In doing so, language learners not only write incorrect forms, but also correct forms of the same structures, both of which provide useful information on their strengths and…

A crucial question for automatically analyzing learner language is to determine which grammatical information is relevant and useful for learner feedback. Based on knowledge about how learner language varies in its grammatical properties, we propose a framework for reusing analyses found in corpus annotation and illustrate its applicability to…

Learning to perform academic writing in university content classrooms is a major challenge facing nonnative-English-speaker (NNS) students. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) offers new possibilities for bidirectional peer-to-peer scaffolding in which students interact and negotiate meaning concerning academic writing and thus represents a new…