Learning and Teaching Languages in Technology-Mediated Contexts - The Relevance of Social Presence, Co-Presence, Participatory Literacy, and Multimodal Competence

Kern (2014, 340) reminds us that technology-mediated environments provide today’s language learners with “new kinds of social encounters, new kinds of communities, and new prospects for learning.” Such environments also pose new challenges though, as learning and teaching is by default mediated twice—by the technology and by the target language—and communication and collaboration are becoming increasingly multimodal, that is, allowing users to draw on a repertoire of meaning-making resources (visual, spoken, gestural, written, three-dimensional, and any combination of these). As a result, language educators find themselves in quest of pedagogical approaches which allow them to make adequate use of CMC-based collaboration for learning and teaching purposes. While this requirement has been widely accepted (see, for example, Hubbard and Levy 2006; Farr and Murray 2016), a hierarchical and prescriptive use of technologies often still prevails in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) settings accompanied by a tendency to reproduce power structures known from more traditional face-to-face classrooms. Hence the prerequisite need for teachers “to appreciate the value of social constructivism and related approaches in preparing their students to participate, as employees and citizens, in digitally mediated societies” (Pegrum 2009, 49)