Abstract:

Recent innovations in technology allow foreign language learners and their instructors to interact both inside and beyond the classroom using a variety of communicative tools. As a consequence, the classroom has been transformed into an extended learning environment which has had a profound effect on both student and teacher roles. However, the theoretical and pedagogical issues emerging from these new practices have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In an on-going collaborative research project, we seek to gain greater insights into the benefits of specific computer-mediated communication (CMC) activities and to examine the relationship between in-class, online, and out-of-class learning. In this paper, we propose the concept of spiraled interaction--the dynamic interplay of in-class activities that in part focus on meaning and focus on form and online collaborations that have as their primary goal student-constructed representations of knowledge. Our investigation initiates a general framework that combines technology-mediated pedagogy with different learning objectives at various levels of competency.

Author: Nelleka Van Deusen-Scholl, Christina Frei, Edward Dixon