Abstract Summary
The ability to read literary texts and to explore fictional worlds is a competence in its own right. Teaching literature should be based on a model of literary competences that learners need to acquire in order to understand the aesthetic dimension of literary texts and their relation to cultural experiences.
Abstract :
Many researchers agree that digital communication tools are not neutral media (Thorne, 2016; Djonov & van leeuwen, 2013; Van Djick, 2013). In language learning research, rooted in the cultural-historical tradition of Vygotsky (1978) amongst others, many studies have drawn on the notion that technological tools are constitutive forms of human culture that mediate and shape cognition, communication, and material action of humans (Thorne, 2016), including language learners as agents. From this perspective, communication tools are not neutral because of their historical-cultural usage. However, tools can also be considered non-neutral if they are “participants in, rather than merely mediators of, cognition” (Shaffer & Clinton, 2006, p. 297; Thorne & Black, 2011). This draws attention to tools, including ones for language learning, as potentially being intentional agents despite the affordances that tools can offer learners in their process of learning a language.
Following this, this case study focuses on a 100% online language learning scenario whereby learners carry out oral tasks using a seemingly “neutral” audioconferencing tool. It explores if and how agents are at work in this scenario and how they can be identified. It asks what pedagogical actions can be taken by language teachers and researchers in order to become more aware of non-human agents while learners use digital communication tools.
Results highlight a number of non-human agents in the scenario that at first sight are ‘hidden’. The study concludes that an increased awareness of these hidden agents and means to identify them may better prepare teachers and learners for facing the non-neutrality of tools-as-agents in the language learning classroom.
