Twenty‐first century technologies and language education: Charting a path forward
Richard Kern
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, necessitating remote instruction in the vast majority of educational institutions around the world, put technology squarely at the center of language learning and teaching. Virtually all teaching and learning was mediated by Zoom or similar videoconferencing platforms. Students could see one another's faces (rather than the backs of their peers’ heads), but they could also completely hide themselves from view. They used the chat window as a communicative backchannel for both authorized and unauthorized comments. They engaged in small group work in breakout rooms that were truly out of earshot of the teacher. Interacting with native speakers online was almost as easy as holding a regular class, once a mutually convenient meeting time could be negotiated. Web content such as videos, songs, news reports, artwork, and historical documents could be seamlessly integrated into lessons without the need for data projectors. However, in many quarters, this technological mediation weakened students’ feelings of belonging, of camaraderie, of esprit de corps. Many teachers (and students) believe that learning remotely was not nearly as effective as face-to-face instruction (Muscanell, 2023). We have now returned to those face-to-face classrooms, and students (at least at my institution) are overjoyed to be in co-present community with one another. But the world is not quite the same as it was prepandemic. The fact that we were able to teach students remotely with some degree of success raises new questions about how we manage instruction going forward. Should we, in an effort to increase lagging enrollments, modify our 5-day-a-week teaching schedule so that we have 3 days in person and 2 days of synchronous or asynchronous online instruction? In theory, this would reduce conflicts with other courses, especially multihour labs. Should we, in an effort to “flip” our classrooms, shift the bulk of presentation of new material to online work that students do at home and then come prepared to apply that material to interactive and reflective activities in the classroom? Should we, to support less commonly taught languages and to broaden our teaching impact more generally, negotiate interinstitutional agreements that would allow sharing of resources (e.g., adding remote students from other institutions to in-person classes)? Should we, to expand our students’ opportunities to use the language they are studying, have them do virtual internships abroad (or in the United States), promoting not only their language and cultural knowledge but also their professional skill set? These and many other questions are raised by new technological possibilities that invite us to reflect on what is important in what we do and to think creatively about what curricular experiments we might wish to try. But the biggest and most dangerous question that has arisen from the pandemic is whether we really need to go back to face-to-face language teaching at all. Contributing to this question is a recent strand of folk wisdom claiming that digital tutorials like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone, machine translation (MT) platforms like Google Translate, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs like ChatGPT have all but rendered obsolete the need for personal instruction in languages other than English in US schools and in higher education. After all, MT allows us to instantly give and receive informational messages in another language; ChatGPT can write coherent, grammatically correct essays for us on any topic and in all major languages; and tutorials can give us the basic vocabulary and grammar we might want to fill in the gaps to get by if we are traveling to another country. This growing perception of irrelevance is reinforced by the fact that language enrollments are dropping in just about every language except Korean and Hawaiian (Berg et al., 2023; MLA, 2022). This is the rationale upon which administrators at West Virginia University based their recent decision to discontinue funding their Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics (Anderson, 2023b). And, of course, all of this is superimposed on the misguided—yet longstanding and persistent—belief held by some administrators (and some faculty colleagues from other disciplines) that language teaching is essentially remedial activity and is therefore marginal to the mission of a research university. Our profession is truly at an inflection point. 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