This chapter aims at presenting an overview of how our experiences as professors of Spanish, French, and English studies at the Department of Modern Languages (DML) of the University of São Paulo (USP) responded to the challenges put forward by the pedagogical and technological practices required since the outbreak of the COVID-19 health crisis,…

Email remains a key mode of communication between faculty and students in higher education institutions. Composing appropriate email texts is an important skill for learners; however, little technological support is available for the pragmatic aspect of email communication -- the ways in which social context influences language choices.…

Despite the benefits of multimodal technology in the language classroom and common practice to introduce digital tools in language teaching, research has shown that many language teachers do not feel confident to engage with and create online multimodal learning resources and environments. This exploratory study examines data from five experienced…

Voice interaction assistants, such as "Siri," "Alexa," or "Google Assistant," offer new opportunities to create meaningful, fun tasks for language learning that require accurate spoken production. Designing good tasks requires an understanding of the learning context and needs as well as the interactional…

This study examines the L2 pronunciation feedback provided by the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) functionality in Google Translate (GT). We focus on three Quebec Francophone (QF) errors in English: th-substitution, h-deletion, and h-epenthesis. Four hundred and eighty male and female QF recordings of sentences with correctly and incorrectly…

Synchronous online language teaching involves the simultaneous employment of a range of techno-semio-pedagogical competences (Guichon, 2012). Indeed, given their flexibility and versatility, digital tools and the Internet can render teacher-student interactions dynamic. Among the necessary professional skills and strategies for online synchronous…

This paper focuses on Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC) as a tool to train L2 listening and introduces new features to facilitate speech-related difficulties. PSC is an intelligent caption that extensively processes the audio and transcript to detect and present difficult words or phrases for L2 learners. With the new features, learners can…

The University of Calgary transitioned to online teaching in March 2020. Subsequent months saw instructors working to overcome the personal, technological, and pedagogical challenges involved in this. Central to those discussions was the need to increase student engagement and develop effective assessment formats. Based on student feedback and…

This article introduces self-regulation features with Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC) for practicing listening skills and fostering self-paced and autonomous learning. PSC generates a partial caption by focusing on acoustically and lexically difficult words and synchronizes each word's appearance with the speaker's speech. The aim is to…

In Chapter 4, Tara Hashemi examines Graduate Student Teachers' (GSTs') perceptions of their professionalization in FL programs which have adopted a literacy-based approach to teaching French in the United States. Findings show that while some clear efforts are being made by language program directors to provide GSTs with a large panoply of tools,…

The present exploratory study investigated the efficacy of secondary face-to-face classroom-based English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction digitally supported by the FeedBook, an interactive computer assisted language learning web-based suite of exercises providing item-level scaffolded feedback. Seventy-seven native (L1) German…

Language researchers and teachers have long been interested in the timing of learning, and the distributed practice effect, whereby greater inter-session intervals result in longer retention, is well-known (Kim & Webb, 2022). Many L2 studies have focused on the intentional learning of lexis (Edmonds, Gerbier, Palasis, & Whyte, 2021),…

This article discusses the benefits of theatrical texts in language courses for beginners. These original, fun, and yet challenging materials help learners develop linguistic and intercultural competencies and transferable skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and cooperation. Specifically, this article examines the use of Jean…

It is widely believed that digitally-driven changes are not welcomed amongst academic staff in higher education. However, when in March 2020, the University of Nottingham went online in response to the UK government's COVID-19 lockdown, a different picture started to emerge. This contribution reflects on the initial steps taken to respond to the…

This paper shows how Task-Based Learning (TBL) is used to equip second-year Spanish students at Cardiff University for their placements during their year abroad. We present a set of task-based projects embedded within the curriculum to enhance both (1) the competences students have to acquire throughout their degree, and (2) the skills to overcome…