This paper reports a study in a technology-assisted Chinese teaching context where one major teaching objective is to encourage international students to participate in speech contests with the theme of 'Tell China, Tell Your Stories'. Results showed that through four weeks' preparation, all the students had a more robust method for presentation…

The use of innovative language in education is a current and pressing issue in a digital landscape where knowledge and skills are acquired in much more complex and fragmented ways than in the past (Di Blas, 2016; Selvaggi, Sicignano, & Vollono, 2007). We are experiencing a lot of interest in flipped classrooms, interactive learning…

Ipsative assessment is an approach to evaluating student progress that covers a wide range of assessment and feedback practices. In ipsative assessment, students receive an indication of their achievement that represents the extent of their improvements from their previous assessed task(s) in relation to one or more objectives. In turn, ipsative…

The year abroad is one of the most exciting yet challenging aspects of studying modern languages. In addition to the difficulties that all students face in transitioning to the year abroad, students of Arabic face the challenge of Arabic diglossia, given the existence of different written and spoken language varieties. To help with the transition…

Today's use of technology and media in daily life has altered the dominant role the written word has played in communication over centuries. Currently, educational settings take into consideration the combination of different modes of representation that exist in an array of everyday texts. "Developing knowledge about linguistic, visual and…

This study addresses interculturality and Intercultural Competence (IC) by connecting university students in Spain and Sri Lanka through the use of the Soqqle app, an education-based video app. The students were asked to create five videos independently using English as a lingua franca and upload each video to the app related to the assigned…

Video is used widely in language education as a learning tool and a production tool for students to demonstrate oral competence. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Irish language lecturers at Dublin City University (DCU) set asynchronous video assessment tasks for students on teacher education programmes. Tasks were completed using the…

This paper describes the use of screencast feedback to enhance teaching presence and weekly self-reflection surveys to enhance social presence among students and build a community of learners. These approaches were found to diminish the feeling of isolation in online learning environments. Further findings indicated that this multimodal approach…

During our six-week Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) module (Oct.-Nov. 2019), 58 students jointly developed task-based projects on expressions of popular culture in Albany (USA) and Caracas (Venezuela). In teams of seven to eight participants, learners from both countries reflected on variations of popular culture through…

Escape games are an increasingly popular leisure activity involving a group of players completing tasks to achieve a pre-defined goal, which is usually escaping from a room. In this chapter, I briefly outline the educational potential of escape game activities in language classes within the frameworks of gamification, pervasive learning, and…

Mobile COLT is a portable platform for analysis of activities in the second language classroom, and is based on the well-known Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) scheme (Spada & Fröhlich, 1995). It has been developed to facilitate real-time class analysis using a Windows tablet. This paper first describes the COLT analysis…

This study investigated the effects of using an online High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) program for university students whose first language is Japanese and who studied English as a foreign language. The target sounds were English fricatives, which many of the participants felt were challenging to distinguish and articulate. The training…

In 2013, the so-called Viducation project was launched at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Kiel4 (CAU) as a reaction to the new Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts degree programmes in order to improve students' learning skills and core competences by creating subject-related videos. Filmmaking by students is already widely…

This paper focuses on Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC) as a tool to train L2 listening and introduces new features to facilitate speech-related difficulties. PSC is an intelligent caption that extensively processes the audio and transcript to detect and present difficult words or phrases for L2 learners. With the new features, learners can…

This paper will detail the introduction of the open-source content creation tool H5P in a first year university French language module with 115 students in autumn 2019 and its evaluation in early spring 2020. The aim of this project is to analyse what happens when students are given access to an authoring tool traditionally intended for and used…