Young people today face an uncertain future. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in state education are investing their expertise in Online Community Projects (OCPs) as a digital mediation tool to help their students acquire intercultural awareness and experiment with new uses for technology. This qualitative study employs analytic…

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…

Telecollaboration in the language classroom promotes both second-language development and Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC). However, previous research identified its potential limitations, including instances of failure, misunderstanding, tension, and a reluctance to participate. The current study contributes to emerging literature…

Spanish learners engaged in two-way interaction gap tasks where, through social interaction, they identified and defined low-frequency vocabulary. Participants (referred to as actors to differentiate them from task partners) completed two such tasks. Each time, they collaborated with different partners of varying degrees of Spanish proficiency and…

Although studying teachers' online interactions has gained momentum in recent years, little is known about interactional development in online communities. The present study addressed this gap by exploring discursive change in second language teachers' interactions in an online professional development (PD) course structured around mobile phone…

After identifying a major limitation of current research on telecollaboration, I propose to develop a methodological framework to empirically study the link between the sociocultural dimension and the linguistic dimension of interaction in eTandem via desktop videoconferencing. For the sociocultural dimension, I study which roles the learners take…

Actively encouraging foreign language learners to establish a meaningful connection with the target language culture--by engaging in authentic activities with other learners and native speakers in real-world communicative contexts--is a critical goal of foreign language education. This paper describes a design-based research study that…

Purpose: Founded in sociocultural theories of learning, the authors argue that engaging learners in collaborative knowledge building is critical. When responding to others' ideas, research shows that learners in online settings more frequently focus on surface-level aspects of colleagues' contributions -- sharing, comparing and praising -- rather…

This article considers the creation of online materials and a set of online processes for language teacher education at a distance in challenging contexts. The tool we used to mediate the processes was Skype. We used a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) analysis to show how our activity system "expanded" as the materials and…

Few studies in language teacher education programs provide insight on how knowledge of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is developed by teacher candidates to support their metalinguistic awareness and preparation to teach language. Building upon the contributions of Johnson and Byrnes, we combined Halliday's language-based theory of learning…

This article presents the language practices of global youth who populate an online discussion forum devoted to Korea-produced dramas. Qualitative data included the writing, visual images, and interactions created within the forum. Findings revealed youth from geographically disparate places using new media affordances to engage with a minority…

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO, 2019), many of today's skills will not match the jobs of tomorrow. Lifelong learning and learning to learn are thus crucial. The main objective of this exploratory research is to investigate how the social dimension of the Russian course sustains autonomisation and whether it supports the…

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…