This study reports on how the affordances of the WebEx platform were used as multimodality resources during the negotiation of meaning by participants engaged in an English/Spanish eTandem video-conferencing exchange. The exchange involved five dyads of university students with an intermediate level of language proficiency. A total of seven tasks…

The present study explored negotiated interaction with Grade 6 students (age 11-12) engaged in communicative tasks supported by Club Penguin Island, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Unlike previous studies on digital games, the present study assessed the use of Club Penguin Island during face-to-face interaction.…

This paper presents a case study of an individual student's increasing approximation of academic discourse during a third-semester Spanish class that included chat-based instruction. During both chat-based activities and oral discussions in class, the student's language use became increasingly characterized by longer turns and the use of…

This article reports an investigation of second language (L2) students' class participation in English-language university courses in two different modes: face-to-face off-line and asynchronous online. The study addressed (1) what characteristics of academic online discourse were created in graduate courses; (2) how students reported their…

Research on the effectiveness of short-term study-abroad (SA) programs for improving oral skills has shown mixed results. In this study, 24 L2 German learners (L1 English) provided pre- and post-SA speech samples addressing a hypothetical situation and completed surveys on cross-cultural interest and adaptability; L2 communication affect,…

It is intuitively felt that visual cues should enhance online communication, and this experimental study aims to test this prediction by exploring the value provided by a webcam in an online L2 pedagogical teacher-to-learner interaction. A total of 40 French undergraduate students with a B2 level in English were asked to describe in English four…

This article reports on the variable omission of the French negative particle "ne" (the first marker of verbal negation) in synchronous (i.e., real-time) electronic communication environments. Patterns of variation in a corpus of non-educational chat (i.e., free, public-access Internet chat) are analyzed and compared to data produced by first-,…

In this article, issues of identity in second language (L2) learning are examined by using discourse analysis and ethnographic observations to analyze electronic bulletin board postings by ESOL students in a content-based class as they participated in discussions about gay rights and homosexuality. Drawing on notions of identity construction,…

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are often portrayed as offering a collaborative community space in which native and non-native language speakers reciprocally scaffold linguistic, cultural and content knowledge, a space which assists students in overcoming well-documented challenges encountered in traditional classrooms (Leki,…

This longitudinal case study draws on sociocultural theory to investigate language learning as a socially mediated process through computer-mediated communicative tasks in an international languages class. The study reports on the design, implementation, and outcomes of a thematic, task-based curricular innovation in which paired Korean-and…

Describes the use of computer pen pals to offer foreign language students who are at different levels of instruction to participate in activities that involve real life situations. Designed to develop writing skills, these activities help students review vocabulary and to practice verb forms and grammatical structures. (Author/VWL)

Reviews early research on innovative use of networked computers in language learning, focusing on a study of computer-mediated discussion that examined student/student and student/teacher interactions in a college French course. Due to rapid nature of computer-mediated exchanges, the "conversation" is a hybrid somewhere between writing and…

This research study investigated the potential of Internet technology to provide a dynamic and autonomous language-learning environment for adult distance language learners. The study focused on five essential characteristics of dynamic language learning and observed the online study activity of the students in relation to these. Learners were…