Frank Monaghan

Books, pictures and conversations: using bilingual multimedia storybooks to develop language awareness

The advent of multimedia technology provides many new opportunities for accelerating learning in a range of situations, including language teaching. This paper describes the work of Fabula, a multinational, multidisciplinary project funded by the European Commission. It focuses, in particular, on the evaluation of a bilingual multimedia storybook with primary school children (aged 6-10) in both Welsh- and English-medium settings in South Wales. It explores interesting insights on language preferences, learning strategies, and hypotheses about the way that language works through the spontaneous comments offered by pairs of children using the software. It locates the use of multimedia technology in research on language awareness, and argues for the positive effects and potential of such resources.

Seeing Red: social media and football fan activism

This chapter explores the role social media play in allowing political activists to come together around a shared real-world goal. Since the mid-1980s, technologies such as email, mobile phones, and interactive websites such as Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, have transformed the means and opportunities for activists to employ social media in order to ‘communicate, collaborate and demonstrate’ (Garrett, 2004, p. 202). Key factors in this include: the relatively low cost of online communication, which enables a typically resource-poor and therefore power-less resistance to organize against a resource-rich and therefore powerful opposition (Bonchek, 1995); the promotion of a collective identity across a dispersed population that activists can then mobilize in pursuit of interests perceived as core to that identity (Brainard & Siplon, 2000); and the creation of communities that foster issue-based communication and thus strengthen participants’ identification with the movement (Diani, 2000). Far from producing a generation of bedroom-bound isolates, social media in these cases appear to be bringing people together both virtually and physically in pursuit of common