Introduction to Colloquium

Welcome everybody. This is the colloquium on technology-mediated TBLT: Challenges and opportunities.

My name is Marta Gonzalez-Lloret, from the University of Hawaii, and I am the organizer of the colloquium. We will have four presentations this morning. As you may have noticed, here with us we have two presenters: Katie Nielson from the University of Maryland and Paula Winke from Michigan State University. Our two other presentations will be technology-mediated. We will have a presentation by Rebecca Adams from Arizona and July Sykes will join us from Oregon. Finally our discussant, Lourdes Ortega from Georgetown University will help us wrap up the ideas from the colloquium and get some conclusions. Each presentation will last about 20 minutes and then we would like to have 20 to 30 minutes at the end for Questions and Answers.

We wanted to propose a colloquium on technology-mediated TBLT first because the inclusion of technology i is a topic that is rapidly growing within TBLT. Testimony of this are the 10 presentation in this conference that include a technological component; And second, because we are working on a John Benjamins volume for the TBLT series with this same title and through the process we realized that although there are some scholars working on the topic (and we were very lucky to have worked with some of them in this volume), it was important to try to bring this topic to the attention of the larger TBLT community.

We think the need to integrate computer and information technologies in education is unquestionable today. Technologies have become embedded in the life and learning processes of many new generations of students and although a digital divide still may exists in most parts of the world, many of our students have grown surrounded by computers and laptops and by increasingly sophisticated communication devices that support personal, portable, wireless networked communication. The incorporation of technology in our societies has meant that teachers are keen on integrating digital technologies into their expertise. Language educators are increasingly interested in welcoming into their teaching current Web 2.0 technologies such as chats, blogs, wikis, synthetic immersive environments, virtual worlds, and gaming environments.

But no matter how exciting new technologies for language learning may seem, they can become nothing more than entertainment unless their design, use, and evaluation are guided by viable educational and language developmental rationales and we want to propose here that TBLT may be particularly relevant for informing and maximizing the potential of technological innovations for language learning.

Web 2.0 technologies create unprecedented environments in which students can engage in “doing things” with language rather than just reading about language and culture in textbooks or hearing about them from teachers. It is this potential of new technologies to engage students in active learning and holistic tasks that makes them excellent candidates for their integration in TBLT as a well-theorized approach to language education.

We firmly believe in the possibility of reciprocal benefits between technologies and TBLT, particularly if task-and-technology integrations are properly motivated by TBLT theory and we came out with the term “technology-mediated TBLT” to express this symbiosis (González-Lloret & Ortega,  forthcoming). We would argue that language learning tasks which are mediated by new technologies can help minimize students’ fear of failure, embarrassment, or losing face; they can raise students’ motivation to take risks and be creative while using language to make meaning; and they can enable students to meet other speakers of the language in remote locations, opening up transformative exposure to authentic language environments and cultural enactments, along with tremendous additional sources of input.

More generally, we believe fruitful blends of technology and tasks can promote active student engagement in learning. However, as technology and innovation advances, TBLT practitioners are faced with the need to research and adapt basic TBLT principles to new online tools and environments. This rapid technological change fuels constant transformations in learning and language use, continually creating new language education need, new curricular and instructional responses, and new challenges for the practitioners.

This colloquium focuses on those challenges and opportunities of integrating and expanding traditional TBLT methodologies with the mediation of educational technology. The presentations in the colloquium will address four very different areas of TBLT (task complexity, feedback, assessment and teacher training) and will present different technologies (CMC, digital games and an online course). We hope this variety reflects the breath of research in technology-mediated TBLT.