Virtual exchange (VE) is an ideal venue for digital literacy skills development (Fuchs, Hauck & Müller-Hartmann, 2012) and for critical digital literacy (CDL) (Hauck, 2019). Yet literacy is a fluid, deictic term, the meaning of which is context dependent, and digital literacies need to be defined and conceptualised within a specific context.…

Drawing upon research on narrative and speech styles and on digital and multimodal communication, the author proposes multimodal narrative discourse analysis (MNDA) with associated pedagogical and analytical procedures to teach and study storytelling. The second language (L2) students first participated in multimodal narrative simulations in the…

The study of multimodality in communication has attracted the attention of researchers studying online multimodal environments such as virtual worlds. Specifically, 3D virtual worlds have especially attracted the interest of educators and academics due to the multiplicity of verbal channels, which are often comprised of text and voice channels, as…

In today's globalized world, learning languages and developing intercultural skills are of paramount importance due to dynamic and complex global interdependencies. However, not every language student around the world has a chance to engage in face-to-face intercultural communication with people from different backgrounds. Telecollaboration offers…

This study examines the impact of group composition (one-on-one vs. multiple-to-multiple) and task design (student-selected vs. teacher-assigned) on undergraduate foreign language learners' interactions in a mobile-based intercultural exchange. The participants, 27 Korean students learning English as a foreign language and 27 American students…

Since advances in computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools have made virtual exchanges readily available in educational practices, telecollaboration has been gaining traction as a means to provide practical experiences and cultural exposure to language learners and, more recently, teacher trainees. Drawing upon Byram's (1997) model of…

Creating collaborative working and learning experiences has long been at the forefront of computer-assisted language learning research. It is in this context that, in recent years, the integration of social networking sites and Web 2.0 in learning settings has surged, generating new opportunities to establish and explore virtual communities of…

This study sought to determine the difference in text-based negotiated interaction between non-native speakers of English (NNS-NNS) and between non-native and natives (NNS-NS) in terms of the frequency of negotiated instances, successfully resolved instances, and interactional strategy use when the dyads collaborated on Facebook. It involved 10…

This article investigates research approaches used in traditional classroom-based interaction studies for identifying a suitable research method for studies in three-dimensional virtual learning environments (3DVLEs). As opportunities for language learning and teaching in virtual worlds emerge, so too do new research questions. An understanding of…

In this study of affordances for second language (L2) learning in World of Warcraft (WoW) group play, we compared three gameplay episodes spanning a semester-long course. Applying multimodal analysis framed by ecological, dialogical and distributed (EDD) views (Zheng and Newgarden, forthcoming), we explored four English as a second language…

Despite a growing body of research on task-based language learning (TBLT) (Samuda & Bygate, 2008; Ellis, 2003), there is still little information available regarding the pedagogical design behind tasks and how they are implemented (Samuda & Bygate, 2008). Scholars in computer-mediated second language (L2) learning have called for research…

This study investigates an instantiation of a 3D virtual world-based Japanese learning curriculum within the context of a Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) classroom. Through a mixed-method case study approach, participants' natural acquisition of Japanese in a 3D virtual environment was examined. In the present study, four sources of data from…

This study reports on a qualitative study which explored 32 pre-service teachers' evaluations of two online seven-week introductory courses in corpus linguistics (CL). Data were gathered through questionnaires, participants' written journals, post-course semi-structured email interviews, and discussion forum entries. The qualitative analysis of…

Learning how to comprehend while listening to a second language is often considered by learners to be a difficult process that can lead to anxiety when trying to communicate (Graham, 2006; Graham & Macaro, 2008). Computer-mediated communication (CMC) can be used to assist in increasing access to native speakers and opportunities to listen.…

This case study explores how a Chinese-American novice teacher acted as mediator in a telecollaboration with student teacher (ST) peers in the USA who designed tasks for his English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in China. The novice teacher was instrumental in mediating the student teachers' task design process by providing feedback…