Knowing that the Tridem project had not yielded all its potential, we decided to revisit the data collected to take another look at learner interactions, more specifically on the strategies used by those participants who had worked together successfully. Apart from my own interest in MCSs (Hauck, 2005; Hauck & Hurd, 2005), research into strategy use in online settings had – up to then – been scant. Yet SLA
researchers such as Chapelle (1990, 1995) had long suggested that CALL
investigations should incorporate areas central to SLA such as learning strategies.
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Yet we still knew very little about how online language learners deploy strategies and how they develop strategic competence.
However, informed strategy use seemed particularly relevant in environments that – at least at the time – students were either less familiar with, or, that they used primarily for social rather than educational purposes. Hampel and Lamy (2007) had highlighted the following challenges:
● profusion of material ● cognitive overload ● need for technoliteracy
● different time structures (asynchronous versus synchronous) and impact on interaction
● unequal participation patterns (e.g. “lurking”) ● anonymity of environment
● need for netiquette
● need for teacher involvement and support.
Picking up from Hauck and Hurd (2005), Hauck and Hampel (2008) make affective and also social strategies the focal point of the study. In doing so, we followed the recommendation of developmental psychologists such as Jones and Issroff (2005), who highlight the importance of considering affective and social factors when using technologies for learning. The impact of learning theories rooted in the psychology of language learning is best reflected in what Block (2003) calls the “social turn” in SLA. He argues for “a broader, socially informed and more sociolinguistically orientated
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SLA that does not exclude the more mainstream psycholinguistic one, but instead takes on board the complexity of context, the multi-layered nature of language and an expanded view of what acquisition entails” (p. 4).
In language learning and technology, the changing view of learning as a socially based activity is accompanied by the move from CALL, with its predominant behaviourist and instructivist approach, to CMC with a strong focus on language learning in interaction (Warschauer & Kern, 2000). This, as Hampel et al. (2005) point out, includes interacting with representations. Hence the centrality the “social turn” grants to the “context” chimed well with the developing argument in my scholarly work.
In Hauck and Hampel (2008), we take Oxford’s (1990) framework of language learning strategies, together with Ellis’s (1994) examples, as the point of departure to establish whether they apply to CMC-based language learning contexts. We are able to show that those affective and social strategies that learners use in more traditional learning settings are also relevant online. Drawing on data from learner diaries (interaction logs; see Hauck, 2007 for methods used) kept by the French Tridem participants, we identified a set of strategies which we termed “socio-environmental strategies”. While these relate directly to the French students’ social strategy use, they also relate to how they made use of functionalities of the online environments – the available modes and their affordances – to improve communication and
interaction, e.g. posting summarising notes on synchronous meetings that had taken place in Lyceum to the blog, typing into text chat (Lyceum) to compensate for the lack of spontaneity in the voice exchanges (Lyceum), etc. The findings indicated that
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social and affective strategies from face-to-face settings need to be tailored to virtual contexts. They also confirmed – yet again – Hampel’s (2006) and Hampel and Hauck’s (2006) assertion about the need for language learner and teacher
preparation for multimodally informed technology use, including the development of socio-environmental strategies. To this effect, we argue for training based on the direct interventionist contextualised approach first mentioned in Hauck (2005) so that teachers as learners, and subsequently their students, can draw maximum benefit from the representational resources available in a given VLE.
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The next part, section 4.3, marks the transition in the literature from Telecollaboration to Telecollaboration 2.0 (Guth & Helm, 2010) and the shift in my research of modes and meaning-making from telecollaborative exchanges between students and teachers to between teacher trainees and teacher educators. It is also the point where I begin to frame multimodal competence and multimodal communicative competence as multimodal literacy, and the latter in turn as a defining element of multiliteracies.
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4.3 Multiliteracies
The studies discussed in the publications in section 4.3 are based on exchanges which fall into the remit of Telecollaboration 2.0, a concept introduced by Guth and Helm (2010) into language learning research to reflect the fact that the scope of telecollaborative encounters had broadened by then. “The open, collaborative and relational mindset of Web 2.0 and the multimodal, social, Internet-based 2.0 environments and tools,” Helm (2014) points out, “offer great opportunities for collaboration and participation” (p. 4). They also increase the variety of modes at learners’ disposition to communicate, exchange, and compare information. Referring to the Soliya Connect Program, Helm (2014, p. 4) states the following:
Through this project participants learn to use the multiple modes of communication available to support understanding and become effective intercultural communicators in online contexts. Participants acquire digital literacies such as expressing themselves effectively through video, text chat and the audio channel in what for many of them is a foreign language.
Telecollaboration 2.0 also enjoyed increasing popularity in teacher education (e.g. Arnold & Ducate 2006; Müller-Hartmann, 2006). Collaborating online with
colleagues, and subsequently students, from different cultural backgrounds and educational systems allows teacher trainees to first discover, then experience and finally reflect on the multi-layered aspects of their own techno-pedagogy (Desjardins
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& Peters, 2007) and semio-pedagogical competence (Guichon, 2009) in authentic linguistic and intercultural contexts (Hauck & Kurek, 2017).
Through the Tridem project – one group of participants had been teacher trainees – I had gained first-hand experience in Telecollaboration 2.0-based teacher education. The experience was consolidated through four-way telecollaborative exchanges with teacher trainees and language learners in 2008 and 2009. This, together with my substantial expertise in providing continuing professional development opportunities at a distance for associate lecturers at the OU, led to an invitation to chair the Teacher Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) from 2009 onward. Research seminars I organised as SIG chair provided me with further opportunities to promote Telecollaboration 2.0 as an educational intervention to develop participants’
multimodal communicative competence, which I now began to frame as multimodal literacy and as a core element of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, 2008). Multimodal literacy had been defined by Pegrum (2009) as the ability to understand and interpret the relationship and interaction between different formats of digital media and was gaining importance alongside an ongoing shift in linguistics from a focus on language towards a wider focus on semiosis (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011).
‘Multiliteracies’ is a concept first coined by the New London Group (1996). It refers to a broadened understanding of literacy to include electronic forms of multimedia, images and texts which was to replace traditional language-based academic discourses. Since then, educators have repeatedly recognised that the concept of
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literacy must be pluralised (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Pegrum, 2011) to encompass an ever-expanding range of component literacies. In the same vein, Kern (2014) reminds us that literacies are multiple, not only in relation to their cultural, historical, and linguistic dimensions but also in relation to the
demands made by various media and multimodal communication practices.
The two book chapters (Hauck 2010a and 2010b) and the article (Fuchs et al., 2012) in section 4.3 are based on the 2008 and 2009 telecollaborative exchanges
mentioned above.