1st week Reading Reaction

Reaction to "Research perspectives on online discourse and foreign language learning." 

By Blyth, C.

The research on online discourse and foreign language learning shift from a psycholinguistic approach to a sociocultural and to, more recently, an ecological approach seems to be increasing as times goes by. This shift reflects that, more and more, the social context of foreign language learning is being a more common focus for teacher researchers. All of this is a call for us as English teachers and researchers to move from a technocentric, quantitative, cognitive, and input/output research aim to a more qualitative, ethnographic, semiotic, and ecological target in research and teaching. Such a research aims transition is recommended in order for us to start shedding light on the social impact of online discourses on students' language learning rather than on the usual cognitive role of them.

By researching and teaching through CMC and CALL under a sociocultural and ecological approach, we can shed light on the ways macrosystems affect students' microsystems, bearing in mind that the language a student produces depends on the context and the other way around. By changing our perspective on research and practices, we can begin to contribute to a cultural understanding of the social factors that influence our students' language learning such as identity, gender, ethnicity, etc., unlike psycholinguistic approaches in which we could merely observe students' form-meaning connections.

I am not stating that psycholinguistic approaches are not productive anymore. Instead, I consider we should start accommodating our practices in an ecological way in which psychological, social, and environmental processes intertwine and fulfill the current technological challenges. That simple interconnectedness within a CALL environment not only allows us to satisfy students' intercultural competence goals motivated by the era they were born in, but also enables us teachers to delve into new foreign language teaching trends such as social semiotics and multiliteracies that we can implement with our students so as to achieve those goals.