Research involving digital games and language learning is rapidly growing. One advantage of using digital games to support language learning is the ability to collect data on students learning in real time. In this study, we use educational data mining methods to explore the relationship between in-game data and elementary students' Chinese…

In order to develop pragmatic competence in a language other than our own (L2), it is important to have enough knowledge of the cultural norms of the target language and enough opportunities to interact with a wide range of speakers to deploy different speech acts, registers, levels of politeness, conversational moves, and the like. The…

The purposes of this study are to examine the relation between playing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) games in the wild and L2 English vocabulary and to offer comparisons with non-gamers' vocabulary. Data were collected from two samples of teenage L2 English learners in Sweden, Sample A (N = 1,069) and Sample B (N = 16). Questionnaires and…

In the 20th anniversary issue of this journal, Reinders and White (2016) describe the relationship between computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and autonomy as having become "both more complex and more promising" (p. 143). This is, they assert, in large part due to the rise of informal language learning online, with an accompanying…

It has been repeatedly asserted in recent years that telecollaboration is such a powerful and effective tool for both second language acquisition (SLA) and fostering intercultural communication competence (ICC) that it should be regularly included in foreign language instruction (Çiftçi & Savas, 2018; Lewis & O'Dowd, 2016a; O'Dowd, 2016a;…

Through the analytical lens of activity theory (Leontiev, 1978, Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), the present study investigates the uptake of affordances for language learning by young (ages 7-11) Danish children (N = 15) in their engagement with English language media in the digital wild. Drawing on ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979), during…

Language teachers are working in a world which has changed in the past decades in fundamentally disruptive ways, through profound changes in the role that networked computers play in everyday life and through the social and demographic shifts brought on by an increasingly globalized society, bringing together more than ever before people from…

Behaviour-tracking technology has been used for decades in SLA research on focused practice with an eye toward elucidating the nature of L2 automatization (e.g. DeKeyser, 1997; Robinson, 1997). This involves longitudinally capturing learners' judgments or linguistic production along with their response times in order to investigate how specific…

This paper reports on a study into the effects of digital game play on learners' Willingness to Communicate (WTC), or individuals' "readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2" (MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément, & Noels, 1998, p. 547). Thirty Thai learners of English as a foreign…

The relationship between digital game play and second language (L2) learning is a particularly tricky issue in East Asia. Though there is an emerging presence of Chinese online games, many more young people are playing the English- or Japanese-language versions of the most popular commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) video games. In other words, most…