The pandemic in 2020 has profoundly impacted millions of people all around the world. We have experienced intense disruption in our daily lives. We have lost loved ones, jobs, motivation, and precious time that could have been used more productively. The pandemic did not distinguish between borders, race, or gender. It affected everyone but not…

This article revisits the TESOL Technology Standards for Teachers (TTST) and discusses the potential for their continued relevance 13 years after they were first promulgated (TESOL, 2008). To provide a historical backdrop, I first cover the development of the standards from the inside perspective of one of the six members of the team that created…

This study investigates the identities produced by three L2 teachers of different backgrounds and experiences in an intercultural telecollaborative project that integrated the use of mixed-reality technology. Content-analysis (Hoffman et al., 2011) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2011) were employed to identify the identity elements…

This exploratory study investigated the usability of immersive virtual reality (VR) as a way of creating a role-play task to examine pragmatic competence, specifically the ability to produce the speech act of request. The study created a closed role-play task in two versions. One was a standard computer-based version in which participants read a…

This study analyzed eTandem video-conferencing exchanges between five pairs of university students of English as a foreign language (EFL) and Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). The exchanges, which involved discussion of seven tasks, took place on a weekly basis. Drawing on an interactionist perspective (Ellis et al., 2001a; Loewen, 2005), the…

The use of digital technology in the subject of Swedish as a second language (SSL) has increased in recent years. Schools in Sweden have received many newly arrived students due to the migration situation prevailing in contemporary European society. This article shares the findings of a study carried out on six SSL teachers' perceptions and…

The expansion of MOOCs (massive open online courses) is very much associated with instructors interested in the craft of teaching, innovating, and experimenting with different methods to improve and expand students' learning experience. The Erasmus+ project MOONLITE has worked to create cross-institutional scenarios and new educational pathways…

This study argues for grounding the teaching of presentational communication in a foreign language (FL) in Making- and Design-related concepts. We use the example of creating personal narrative podcasts in an advanced collegiate FL course to demonstrate how these concepts facilitate student learning outcomes in relation to genre awareness, digital…

The use of digital exhibitions in two advanced language and culture courses within a liberal arts curriculum provides an innovative pedagogical approach to promoting language learning and critical analysis. This article proposes a pedagogy to incorporate Maker-Centered Learning (MCL), the framework that emerged from a Harvard Graduate School of…

Adult learners benefit from a playful approach to learning (Whitton, 2018). Similarly, students experiencing immersive learning using virtual reality headsets can benefit from a playful and exploratory approach to language and culture learning (Arnold, 1979), which includes the opportunity to experiment and create content using accessible,…

This article discusses the development of an immersive virtual reality (VR)-infused Makerspace for experiential learning. Students in an advanced-level Russian course used a Makerspace to complete a three-part project aimed at language and cultural learning through art and presentational speaking. Participants completed a survey about their…

In the digital wilds, thriving storytelling practices (often in transcultural and multilingual contexts) share with Maker culture a belief in learning through doing, bricolage, collaboration, and playfulness. Key examples are fanfiction, a form of creative writing that transforms popular media in some way, and interactive fiction, a form of…

A well-designed game can offer enormous opportunities for pragmatics learning by providing an immersive environment where learners can practice L2 in a variety of social contexts. To examine the applicability of gaming to L2 pragmatics learning, this study used the platform "Unity" to develop a scenario-based digital game…

In response to calls for improving the quality of DCTs as data-gathering instruments, this study investigates the effectiveness of technology-enhanced discourse completion tasks (TE-DCTs) as a method for eliciting nonverbal speaker data. We used a mobile application to administer four TE-DCTs to native speakers (L1) and intermediate and advanced…

This study explores college EFL learners' construction of identity through the analysis of their pragmatic choices in digital stories, in which they narrated their relationship with another person they had helped in the past. More specifically, such choices were examined following Relational Dialectics Theory in learners' enactments of…