EUROCALL’s Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) Special Interest Group wishes to announce the following regional workshop for foreign language educators and researchers:

“Researching Computer Mediated Communication in Foreign Language Education: Issues and Methods”

The workshop will take place between the 23-25 April, 2009 (Thurs-Sat.) at the University of León, Spain.

Participants

Participants should ideally be involved in foreign language education and should have an interest in using and researching computer mediated communication in their teaching and research.

It is hoped that this workshop will be of particular interest to researchers and Masters/ Ph.D. students who are working in the area of online foreign language education.

Theme of the Workshop

Recent developments in online technologies and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) have had a significant impact on the sphere of foreign language education. Language learners are regularly engaged in new types of learning activities such as telecollaborative exchange with members of other cultures using synchronous and asynchronous technology, the development of Web 2.0 documents (e.g. blogs, wikis and podcasts) in the target language and participation in virtual worlds (e.g. Second life) and social networks (e.g. Facebook etc.). A great many educational institutions have also adapted Virtual Learning Environments such as Moodle to organise and administer their online learning activities. These activities and tools imply a complex array of challenges for researchers of online foreign language learning who are seeking to understand a learning environment which has multimedia and multimodal dimensions, alters traditional discourse structures, introduces new notions of authorship and has a distinctly multicultural populace.

This 3 day workshop sets out to deal with how CMC in foreign language education can most effectively be researched and to explore the practical, theoretical and ethical issues which emerge when researching online student communication and collaboration. Prominent themes which will be addressed include the relative value of qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as the differences between sociocultural and cognitive interpretations to foreign language acquisition. The particular challenges involved in researching ‘emerging technologies’ such as social networks, wikis and virtual worlds will also be examined in detail.

Structure of the Workshop

• Guest presentations on some of the key theoretical approaches to FL education which drive research in CMC and online foreign language education.

• Interactive workshops on research methods as applied to online foreign language interaction and learning

• Presentations by participants in which they present and discuss with colleagues their own CMC research findings to date and issues which emerged when researching in this area

• Round table discussions where themes such as the contribution of VLE’s, virtual worlds and Web 2.0 can be discussed in greater detail

• Various ‘virtual’ presentations by invited speakers in other locations using Second Life and other Web 2.0 technologies.