Zoomingoutofthecrisis:Languageandhuman collaboration

Language teachers are often masters of using the physical space in their language classrooms, rearranging furniture, groups, and artifacts to facilitate meaningful encounters with and among learners. Indeed, during the COVID-19 crisis, many language teachers are sharing that these human encounters-...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inForeign language annals Vol. 53; no. 2; pp. 320 - 328
Main Authors Guillén, Gabriel, Sawin, Thor, Avineri, Netta
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Alexandria American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages 01.07.2020
Subjects
Classrooms
Community Relations
COVID-19
Distance Education
Educational Technology
Grammar
Language Acquisition
Language Dominance
Language Teachers
Nonverbal Communication
Physical Environment
Prior Learning
Social Media
Social Networks
Teaching Methods
Video Technology
Videoconferencing
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Summary:Language teachers are often masters of using the physical space in their language classrooms, rearranging furniture, groups, and artifacts to facilitate meaningful encounters with and among learners. Indeed, during the COVID-19 crisis, many language teachers are sharing that these human encounters- reading learners' needs through body language, moving in and out of conversations, or engaging each other face-to-face-are the biggest felt loss in their emergent digital language classrooms. Yet, the new digital realities do not necessarily mean that teachers must sacrifice real collaboration among their learners. Digital tools were often designed to explicitly facilitate multimodal collaboration, and, with a wider variety of humans and human stories than may be found within the four walls of the typical classroom. This article aims to help language teachers facilitate more diverse interactions in the target language through the use of tools, spaces, and strategies that can be easily incorporated into our digital classrooms. We describe three categories of such activities (mobile-assisted learning, tandem learning, and service-learning) and explain how these can be most effectively incorporated into an online language class.
ISSN:0015-718X
1944-9720
DOI:10.1111/flan.12459