From the Special Issue Editors

Abstract

The papers published in this issue of Language Learning and Technology are indicative of current research and exploratory intervention work dealing with the use of new technologies in language learning contexts involving children, teachers, and teacher education students. The range of papers represents diverse areas of interest within second and foreign language learning that is mediated by new technologies. These include new technologies as a language learning medium; sociocultural studies of new technology uses focusing on students interactions with software interfaces and the social interactions occurring around the computer as students work; evaluative studies of ways of Internet use as a language learning resource; and students new technology uses and purposes that are not usually associated with school-based language acquisition (e.g., gaming, text messaging, instant messaging, participating in fan-based Internet spaces). In the opening paper, Child-to-Child Interaction and Corrective Feedback in a Computer Mediated L2 Class, Frank Morris reports findings from a study of corrective feedback on and subsequent repairs to written target language enacted during child-to-child, computer-mediated interactions within a fifth-grade, elementary Spanish immersion class in a southeast region of the United States. This study focusses on a typical teaching-learning activity within the school computer lab where students were paired, but without being told who their partner was or where s/he was sitting in the classroom. Each pair used the discussion function of Blackboard, a Web-based commercial course management interface, to complete an off-line, hardcopy jigsaw task. Morris found that implicit, negotiated corrective feedback more often led to immediate target language error repair than did other types of feedback, such as explicit negative feedback. Carla Meskill focuses on computer-supported classroom discourse in her article, Scaffolding the Learning of At-Risk English Language Learners with Computers. At the center of her study is a very experienced elementary school teacher who works with beginning-level English language learners from low-income homes, in a mid-size, post-industrial city within the US. Meskill s analysis is grounded in the assumption that English is not a socially autonomous system, but is contingent on current and historical patterns of speaking and doing within socially defined contexts. The teacher explicitly recognizes the importance of not simply teaching her students to encode and decode, but how to recognize and navigate the language of school as well in order to help them effectively participate in mainstream instructional activity. Meskill examines what she refers to as triadic scaffolds, comprising teaching strategies, the computer s …