Françoise Blin

Why hasn't technology disrupted academics' teaching practices? Understanding resistance to change through the lens of activity theory

The advent of the Internet heralded predictions that e-learning would transform and disrupt teaching practices in higher education. E-learning also promised to expand opportunities for lifelong and flexible learning, and offered a panacea for practical issues such as decreased funding and increasing student numbers. The anticipated disruption to teaching and learning has not come to fruition however. Although technology is now common place in most higher education institutions - most institutions have invested in a virtual learning environment (VLE) and employ staff dedicated to supporting e-learning - there is little evidence of significant impact on teaching practices and current implementations are accused of being focused on improving administration and replicating behaviourist, content-driven models. This paper discusses a preliminary analysis, rooted in Activity Theory, of the transformation of teaching practices, which did or did not take place in our university following the institution-wide deployment of a VLE. In particular, factors limiting a full uptake of the VLE more advanced functionalities by the wider university community are explored.

CALL and the development of learner autonomy: Towards an activity-theoretical perspective

While the concepts and principles associated with learner autonomy underpin a broad range of CALL applications and research projects, current debates and research paradigms in CALL do not provide adequate tools and models to investigate in depth the relationship between CALL and the development of learner autonomy. This paper explores the potential of cultural-historical activity theory to study this relationship. Starting from the complex and multidimensional nature of learner autonomy, it highlights some of the weaknesses in the CALL literature addressing some aspects of this relationship. Following a presentation of the main tenets of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), including the notion of contradiction which is at the core of CHAT, it then seeks to demonstrate how activity theory can assist us in rethinking our understanding of learner autonomy in the context of technology-rich language learning environments and in formulating suitable criteria and questions, which can guide judgemental and empirical analyses. The paper concludes by illustrating some of the principles explored through examples drawn from an activity-theoretical judgemental analysis of a French module delivered to first year students in Dublin City University.

The use of pre-test and post-test in CALL: a case study

Abstract This paper considers the use of pre- and post-test results as formative evaluation tools and describes a small group evaluation of courseware dealing with French for banking. The results highlight the problems that occurred in the course of the evaluation process and suggest that test results should be interpreted with caution.

In honour of Lesley Shield

This third and last issue of Volume 27 is dedicated to our colleague and friend Lesley Shield, who passed away peacefully on 30 December 2014 following a long and recurring battle with cancer. Lesley was a great friend to many of us and was a very active member of the international Computer Assisted Learning (CALL) community. She was a thorough and reliable reviewer and member of the ReCALL editorial board until October 2014. Her sharp and detailed reviews of submissions to this journal have greatly contributed to the standards that are now achieved. She also served on the EUROCALL Executive Committee for many years and initiated many innovative initiatives. In particular, she had been instrumental in setting up and managing the EUROCALL Conference Virtual Strand, which enables those who cannot physically attend the conference to still be part of it. In September 2006, the EUROCALL Virtual Strand was launched in Granada (http://eurocall2006blog.blogspot.ie/ 2006_08_19_archive.html). For the first time in the history of EUROCALL, keynote presentations were broadcast live to a world audience, a dedicated group of conference participants blogged throughout the conference, and virtual participants throughout the world interacted with those present in Granada. Lesley was a pioneer. She was one of the first CALL scholars committed to exploring the potential of Computer Mediated Communication for language learning (see for example Shield, Weininger & Davies, 1999). In 2008 she co-edited with Agnes Kukulska-Hulme (Shield & Kukulska-Hulme, 2008) a special issue of ReCALL on Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). As a matter of fact, at the time of writing this editorial, a translation in Basque of their co-authored article, An overview of mobile assisted language learning: From content delivery to supported collaboration and interaction (Kukulska-Hulme & Shield, 2008) has just been published (Kukulska-Hulme & Shield, 2015). Lesley is greatly missed by our community and it is fitting that the first two articles in this issue deal with topics that were so close to her heart. In the first article, Huifen Lin offers a meta-analysis of 25 experimental or quasi experimental studies investigating the direct and indirect effects of CMC interventions on the acquisition of oral competences in a second language (L2) and provides valuable suggestions for the conduct of further studies. Van Praag and Sanchez investigate mobile technology use in the actual practices of three L2 teachers. Their findings reveal that, although they recognise the potential benefits of the use of mobile devices in the language classroom, the teachers are reluctant to facilitate their use. Internal and external factors that facilitate or hinder the integration of mobile technology in the classroom are also identified.