LRC Invited Speaker: Dr. Regine Hampel

Please join us for a lecture and discussion by Professor Regine Hampel of the Open University UK titled, “Disruptive Technologies and the Language Classroom.”

The event will take place on December 4, 2020 in Zoom meeting 203 508 3989.

Abstract

New technologies have the potential to open up the classroom and to radically transform how we learn (Säljö 1999; Wertsch 2002). However, there is still a widespread assumption that their use is inconsequential, with many teachers and researchers treating them ‘as a digital simulacrum of earlier analog practices’ (Thorne 2003).

This talk brings together complex systems theory with sociocultural understandings of learning and a multimodal perspective on communication to explore the disruptive potential of the new media. Conceptualizing the language classroom (understood in the widest sense) as an ecosystem consisting of different interacting parts will allow us to focus on the changes that language education has undergone over the past decades as a result of the introduction of new technologies and of how learners shape the tools they use, thus effecting transformative change on individual and collective practices.

I will use the notion of ‘attractors’ to describe face-to-face communication as the original discourse in the language classroom (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008), and then explore how computer mediation has impacted on these attractors. I will show how the new technologies support new interaction patterns and multimodal communication and position language learners differently in relation to the world where language is not just a set of rules but where it is used to make meaning.

To finish, we will discuss the implications of what has been called a ‘phase shift’ for language teachers, researchers and institutions, and how we can realize the potential that the online media offer, thus encouraging a new learning ecology – which has become even more pressing in the context of the current pandemic.