Jonathon Reinhardt
University of Arizona
28 April 2023
International Symposium on New Trends in Language Studies
Abstract:
The field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) emerged in the 1980s in wealthy industrialized nations alongside growing adoption of classroom and personal computer technology. With roots in the post-WWII programmed instruction movement, CALL grew in parallel to second language acquisition, psychology, applied linguistics, and educational technology, reflecting developments in those fields. For example, structural-behaviorist models of learning in the 1960s gave way to communicative frameworks in the 1980s, also paralleling a shift from language labs to personal, networked desktops. Most recently, mobile, multimodal, and informal computing is co-emergent with ecological, relational, and distributed models of language learning and teaching.
To understand CALL as it has developed and will evolve into the future, however, requires a broader perspective that recognizes the role of technology in language teaching and learning throughout history -- beginning before industrialization and including non-digital technologies such as textbooks, teaching standards, and formal degrees -- as tools for implementation of industrial models of schooling, standardized curricula, and national language policy. As it develops into the future, CALL practice will continue to be integrated with new technologies whose emergence is driven not necessarily by pedagogy and learning theory but by commercial and even political interests outside of academia. The work of CALL theoreticians and practitioners, then, is to recognize the situated nature of these technologies, receive them critically, and adapt them for productive educational purposes.
Bio:
Dr. Jonathon Reinhardt (PhD, Penn State) is Professor of English Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona, USA. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between technological change and the theory and practice of technology-enhanced second and foreign language pedagogy, especially with emergent technologies like social media and digital gaming. He is the author of over 40 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books, and he has presented his work in over a dozen countries worldwide. He is Associate Editor of the journal Language Learning and Technology and will serve as the President of CALICO, the Computer Assisted Language Instructional Consortium in 2023-2025