Mobile learning revisited

In the world of ELT teacher blogs, magazines, webinars and conferences right now, you would be hard pressed to avoid the topic of generative AI. Ten years ago, the hot topic was ‘mobile learning’. Might there be some lessons to be learnt from casting our gaze back a little more than a decade?

One of the first ELT-related conferences about mobile learning took place in Japan in 2006. Reporting on this a year later, Dudeney and Hockly (2007: 156) observed that ‘m-learning appears to be here to stay’. By 2009, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme was asking ‘will mobile learning change language learning?’ Her answer, of course, was yes, but it took a little time for the world of ELT to latch onto this next big thing (besides a few apps). Relatively quick out of the blocks was Caroline Moore with an article in the Guardian (8 March 2011) arguing for wider use of mobile learning in ELT. As is so often the case with early promoters of edtech, Caroline had a vested interest, as a consultant in digital language learning, in advancing her basic argument. This was that the technology was so ubiquitous and so rich in potential that it would be foolish not to make the most of it.

The topic gained traction with an IATEFL LT SIG webinar in December 2011, a full-day pre-conference event at the main IATEFL conference early the following year, along with a ‘Macmillan Education Mobile Learning Debate’. Suddenly, mobile learning was everywhere and, by the end of the year, it was being described as ‘the future of learning’ (Kukulska-Hulme, A., 2012). In early 2013, ELT Journal published a defining article, ‘Mobile Learning’ (Hockly, N., 2013). By this point, it wasn’t just a case of recommending teachers to try out a few apps with their learners. The article concludes by saying that ‘the future is increasingly mobile, and it behoves us to reflect this in our teaching practice’ (Hockly, 2013: 83). The rhetorical force was easier to understand than the logical connection.

It wasn’t long before mobile learning was routinely described as the ‘future of language learning’ and apps, like DuoLingo and Busuu, were said to be ‘revolutionising language learning’. Kukulska-Hulme (Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2017) contributed a chapter entitled ‘Mobile Learning Revolution’ to a handbook of technology and second language learning.

In 2017 (books take a while to produce), OUP brought out ‘Mobile Learning’ by Shaun Wilden (2017). Shaun’s book is the place to go for practical ideas: playing around with photos, using QR codes, audio / video recording and so on. The reasons for using mobile learning continue to grow (developing 21^st century skills like creativity, critical thinking and digital literacy in ‘student-centred, dynamic, and motivating ways’).

Unlike Nicky Hockly’s article (2013), Shaun acknowledges that there may be downsides to mobile technology in the classroom. The major downside, as everybody who has ever been in a classroom where phones are permitted knows, is that the technology may be a bigger source of distraction than it is of engagement. Shaun offers a page about ‘acceptable use policies’ for mobile phones in classrooms, but does not let (what he describes as) ‘media scare stories’ get in the way of his enthusiasm.

There are undoubtedly countless examples of ways in which mobile phones can (and even should) be used to further language learning, although I suspect that the QR reader would struggle to make the list. The problem is that these positive examples are all we ever hear about. The topic of distraction does not even get a mention in the chapter on mobile language learning in ‘The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology’ (Stockwell, 2016). Neither does it appear in Li Li’s (2017) ‘New Technologies and Language Learning’.

Glenda Morgan (2023) has described this as ‘Success Porn in EdTech’, where success is exaggerated, failures minimized and challenges rendered to the point that they are pretty much invisible. ‘Success porn’ is a feature of conference presentations and blog posts, genres which require relentless positivity and a ‘constructive sense of hope, optimism and ambition’ (Selwyn, 2016). Edtech Kool-Aid (ibid) is also a feature of academic writing. Do a Google Scholar search for ‘mobile learning language learning’ to see what I mean. The first article that comes up is entitled ‘Positive effects of mobile learning on foreign language learning’. Skepticism is in very short supply, as it is in most research into edtech. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which (that ‘locating one’s work in the pro-edtech zeitgeist may be a strategic choice to be part of the mainstream of the field’ (Mertala et al., 2022)) will resonate with colleagues who wish to give conference presentations and write blogs for publishers. The discourse around AI is, of course, no different (see Nemorin et al., 2022).

Anyway, back to the downside of mobile learning and the ‘media scare stories’. Most language learning takes place in primary and secondary schools. According to a recent report from Common Sense (Radesky et al., 2023), US teens use their smart phones for a median of 4 ½ hours per day, checking for notifications a median of 51 times. Almost all of them (97%) use their phones at school, mostly for social media, videos or gaming. Schools have a variety of policies, and widely varying enforcement within those policies. Your country may not be quite the same as the US, but it’s probably heading that way.

Research suggests that excessive (which is to say typical) mobile phone use has a negative impact on learning outcomes, wellbeing and issues like bullying (see this brief summary of global research). This comes as no surprise to most people – the participants at the 2012 Macmillan debate were aware of these problems. The question that needs to be asked, therefore, is not whether mobile learning can assist language learning, but whether the potential gains outweigh the potential disadvantages. Is language learning a special case?

One in four countries around the world have decided to ban phones in school. A new report from UNESCO (2023) calls for a global smart phone ban in education, pointing out that there is ‘little robust research to demonstrate digital technology inherently added value to education’. The same report delves a little into generative AI, and a summary begins ‘Generative AI may not bring the kind of change in education often discussed. Whether and how AI would be used in education is an open question (Gillani et al., 2023)’ (UNESCO, 2023: 13).

The history of the marketing of edtech has always been ‘this time it’s different’. It relies on a certain number of people repeating the mantra, since the more it is repeated, the more likely it will be perceived to be true (Fazio et al., 2019): this is the illusory truth effect or the ‘Snark rule[1]’. Mobile learning changed things for the better for some learners in some contexts: claims that it was the future of, or would revolutionize, language learning have proved somewhat exaggerated. Indeed, the proliferation of badly-designed language learning apps suggests that much mobile learning reinforces the conventional past of language learning (drilling, gamified rote learning, native-speaker models, etc.) rather than leading to positive change (see Kohn, 2023). The history of edtech is a history of broken promises and unfulfilled potential and there is no good reason why generative AI will be any different.

Perhaps, then, it behoves us to be extremely sceptical about the current discourse surrounding generative AI in ELT. Like mobile technology, it may well be an extremely useful tool, but the chances that it will revolutionize language teaching are extremely slim – much like the radio, TV, audio / video recording and playback, the photocopier, the internet and VR before it. A few people will make some money for a while, but truly revolutionary change in teaching / learning will not come about through technological innovation.

References

Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2007) How to Teach English with Technology. Harlow: Pearson Education

Fazio, L. K., Rand, D. G. & Pennycook, G. (2019) Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 26: 1705–1710. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01651-4

Hockly, N. (2013) Mobile Learning. ELT Journal, 67 (1): 80 – 84

Kohn, A. (2023) How ‘Innovative’ Ed Tech Actually Reinforces Convention. Education Week, 19 September 2023.

Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2009) Will Mobile Learning Change Language Learning? reCALL, 21 (2): 157 – 165

Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2012) Mobile Learning and the Future of Learning. International HETL Review, 2: 13 – 18

Kukulska-Hulme, A., Lee, H. & Norris, L. (2017) Mobile Learning Revolution: Implications for Language Pedagogy. In Chapelle, C. A. & Sauro, S. (Eds.) The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning. John Wiley & Sons

Li, L. (2017) New Technologies and Language Learning. London: Palgrave

Mertala, P., Moens, E. & Teräs, M. (2022) Highly cited educational technology journal articles: a descriptive and critical analysis, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2141253

Nemorin, S., Vlachidis, A., Ayerakwa, H. M. & Andriotis, P. (2022): AI hyped? A horizon scan of discourse on artificial intelligence in education (AIED) and development, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2095568

Radesky, J., Weeks, H.M., Schaller, A., Robb, M., Mann, S., and Lenhart, A. (2023) Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s Smartphone Use. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense.

Selwyn, N. (2016) Minding our Language: Why Education and Technology is Full of Bullshit … and What Might be Done About it. Learning, Media and Technology, 41 (3): 437–443

Stockwell, G. (2016) Mobile Language Learning. In Farr, F. & Murray, L. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 296 – 307

UNESCO (2023) Global Education Monitoring Report 2023: Technology in Education – A Tool on whose Terms?Paris: UNESCO

Wilden, S. (2017) Mobile Learning. Oxford: OUP

---

[1] Named after Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ in which the Bellman cries ‘I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.’

Design thinking and ELT

There has recently been a spate of articles and blog posts about design thinking and English language teaching. You could try ‘Design Thinking in Digital Language Learning’, by Speex, provider of ‘online coaching and assessment solutions’, ‘Design Thinking Activities in the ESL Classroom’, brought to you by Express Publishing, market leaders in bandwagon-jumping, or a podcast on ‘Design thinking’ from LearnJam. Or, if you happen to be going to the upcoming IATEFL conference, there are three presentations to choose from:

• Design thinking, a sticky side up path to innovators
• ESP course development for cultural creative design with design thinking
• Reimagining teacher-centered professional development – can design thinking help?

The term ‘design thinking’ dates back decades, but really took off in popularity around 2005, and the following year, it was a theme at the World Economic Forum (Woudhuysen, 2011) The Harvard Business Review was pushing the idea in 2008 and The Economist ran a conference on the topic two years later. Judging from Google Trends, its popularity appeared to peak about a year ago, but the current dip might only be temporary. It’s especially popular in Peru and Singapore, for some reason. It is now strongly associated with Stanford University, the spiritual home of Silicon Valley, where you can join a three-and-a-half day design thinking bootcamp if you have $14,000 to spare.

What you would probably get for your money is a better understanding of ‘an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration’’ (Miller, 2015). In the Stanford model of design thinking, which is the most commonly cited, this boils down to five processes: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

I appreciate that this must sound a bit vague. I’d make things clearer if I could, but the problem is that ‘the deeper you dig into Design Thinking, the vaguer it becomes’ (Vinsel, 2017). If one thing is clear, however, it’s that things aren’t very clear (Johansson-Sköldberg et al., 2013), and haven’t been since the bandwagon got rolling. Back in 2010, at the 8^th Design Thinking Research Symposium, Badke-Schaub et al. (2010) entitled their paper ‘Design thinking: a paradigm on its way from dilution to meaninglessness’. At a more recent conference, Bouwman et al. (2019) reported that the term is ‘becoming more and more vague’. So, is it a five-step process or not? According to Marty Neumeier, author of many books on design thinking, it is not: ‘that’s crap design thinking, of which there is plenty, I agree’.

My first direct experience of design thinking was back in 2015/16 when I took part in a meeting with publishers to discuss a new coursebook project. My main recollection of this was brainstorming various ideas, writing them down on Post-its, and adding them to other Post-its on the walls around the room. I think this was a combination of the empathizing and defining stages, but I could be wrong. Some years later, I took part in an online colloquium where we did something similar, except the Post-its were now digitalized using the Miro collaborative whiteboard. On both these occasions, the scepticism was palpable (except on the part of the facilitators), but we could all console ourselves that we were being cutting-edge in our approach to problem-solving.

Not everyone has been quite so ambivalent. Graphic designer, Natasha Jen, entitled her talk ‘Design Thinking is Bullsh*t’ and urged design practitioners to avoid the jargon and buzzwords associated with their field, to engage in more self-criticism, to base their ideas on evidence, and to stop assuming that their five-step process is needed for anything and everything (Vinsel, 2017). Vinsel (2017) likens design thinking to syphilis. Even the Harvard Business Review has changed its tune. Iskander (2018) doesn’t mince her words:

When it comes to design thinking, the bloom is off the rose. Billed as a set of tools for innovation, design thinking has been enthusiastically and, to some extent, uncritically adopted by firms and universities alike as an approach for the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. But skepticism about design thinking has now begun to seep out onto the pages of business magazines and educational publications. The criticisms are several: that design thinking is poorly defined; that the case for its use relies more on anecdotes than data; that it is little more than basic commonsense, repackaged and then marketed for a hefty consulting fee. As some of these design thinking concepts have sloshed into the world of policy, and social change efforts have been re-cast as social innovation, the queasiness around the approach has also begun to surface in the field of public policy.

Design thinking meets all the criteria needed to be called a fad (Brindle & Stearns, 2021). And like all fads from the corporate world, it has arrived in ELT past its sell-by date. Its travelling companions are terms like innovation, disruption, agile, iteration, reframing, hubs, thought leaders and so on. See below for a slide from Natasha Jen’s talk. As fads go, it is fairly harmless, and there may well be some design-thinking-inspired activities that could be useful in a language classroom. But it’s worth remembering that, for all its associations with ‘innovation’, the driving force has always been commercialization (Vinsel, 2017). In ELT, it’s about new products – courses, coursebooks, apps and so on. Whatever else may be intended, use of the term signals alignment with corporate values, an awareness of what is (was?) hip and hot in the start-up world. It’s a discourse-shaper, reframing our questions and concerns as engineering problems, suggesting that solutions to pretty much everything can be found by thinking in the right kind of corporate way. No wonder it was catnip to my publishers.

References

Badke-Schaub, P.G., Roozenburg, N.F.M., & Cardoso, C. (2010) Design thinking: a paradigm on its way from dilution to meaninglessness? In K. Dorst, S. Stewart, I. Staudinger, B. Paton, & A. Dong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS8) (pp. 39-49). DAB documents.

Bouwman, S., Voorendt, J., Eisenbart, B. & McKilligan, S. (2019) Design Thinking: An Approach with Various Perceptions. Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Brindle, M. C. & Stearns, P. N. (2001) Facing up to Management Faddism: A New Look at an Old Force. Westport, CT: Quorum Books

Iskander, N. (2018) Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo. Harvard Business Review, September 5, 2018

Johansson-Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J. & Çetinkaya, M. (2013) Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures. Creativity and Innovation Management, 22 (2): 121 – 146

Miller, P. N. (2015) Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts? The Chronicle of Higher Education March 26, 2015

Vinsel, L. (2017) Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains. Medium Dec 6, 2018

Woudhuysen, J. (2011) The Craze for Design Thinking: Roots, A Critique, and toward an Alternative. Design Principles And Practices: An International Journal, Vol. 5

Lifelong learnings

Always learning

In an earlier post , I explored the use of the phrase ‘Always learning’ as a promotional tagline by Pearson. Pearson’s use of the phrase peaked in the early years of the 2010s at a time when the company, facing growing criticism for the length and aggressivity of its tentacles in US education (Ravitch, 2012; Sellar et al, 2016), was particularly keen to fashion ‘its image as a socially responsible edu-business’. Not coincidentally, ‘lifelong learning’, the big idea evoked by ‘Always learning’, saw a resurgence of interest around the same time, as the United Nations published their Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. The fourth of these was:

‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’

This was an extension of the earlier (2000) UN Millennium Development Goal, which aimed for universal primary education. It had been recognised that this was not sufficient to break global cycles of poverty. For that, not only universal secondary education, but also post-secondary (lifelong) learning, were needed, too. The goal was criticised for being vague, over-ambitious and unrealisable, but it was so obviously a ‘good thing’ that it could do nobody any harm to be associated with it.

Lifelong learning, democracy and human capital

The idea of lifelong education may be vague, but its history can be traced back to at least Confucius who said that ‘life is limited, while learning is limitless’ (Guo-Dong, 1994). Plato advocated lifelong learning for the highest ranking members of society. Comenius promoted a more democratic version of lifelong learning, as did Condorcet during the French Revolution (Matheson & Matheson, 1996). More recent incarnations of the idea are often traced back to John Dewey (Fleming, 2011), who saw a close connection between education and democracy, and believed that learning should continue past school ‘irrespective of age’ (Dewey, 1916: 55). The UNESCO report (Faure, 1972), which did so much to establish the idea of lifelong learning in contemporary educational discourse, was very much in the democratic Dewey tradition.

In more recent discourse, the democratic veneer remains visible, but a human capital approach to lifelong learning is now clearly privileged (Fleming, 2011). Supported by international bodies like the OECD and the EU, current discourses prioritize the needs of the marketplace, and place the emphasis on learning as an individualized responsibility (Olssen, 2006). References abound to the rapidly changing nature of our contemporary world, especially the world of work, where only lifelong learning can offer the adaptability and flexibility needed for our occupational, political and ecological survival. Notions of a fuller life and self-actualization have not gone away, but interest is much more squarely centred on the part that lifelong learning can play in the development of human capital. A recent (2021) article from Pearson entitled ‘New research shows employers see lifelong learning as the ‘new normal’ as UK Government releases skills data’ https://plc.pearson.com/en-US/news/new-research-shows-employers-see-lifelong-learning-new-normal-uk-government-releases-skills is typical in this respect. In a similar vein, MOOC provider, FutureLearn (2022), has recently brought out a report into the ‘future of learning’ in which ‘lifelong learning’ is seen as ‘critical to upskilling the workforce of the future’.

Like so many other words I have looked at on this blog, ‘lifelong learning’ ‘has all the trappings of what might be termed a ‘good idea’ — it is bedecked with hurrah words and emotive terms, liberally dispersed by its proponents, and this gives it an air of conceptual solidity, together with making it more readily popular’ (Matheson & Matheson). Meaning little more than learning that is not confined to school, the best way of understanding the term is perhaps to look at what people actually do with it.

Lifelong learning and English language teaching

In the world of English language teaching, one of the early uses of the term ‘lifelong learning’ was in the title of a plenary IATEFL presentation, ‘Developing learner autonomy – preparing learners for lifelong learning’ (Dam, 2002). It was an interesting, but hardly contentious, lecture, arguing that (1) lifelong learning is necessary because schools can’t teach everything, (2) that learner autonomy is necessary for lifelong learning, so (3) our educational focus should be more on learning and less on teaching. Precisely what should be learnt in the long life of learning is left unspecified, and whether that learning should literally continue till death do us part remained equally unclear. Leni Dam was invoking the fashionable term of ‘lifelong learning’ to sell the idea of ‘learner autonomy’. But it really wasn’t needed: even month-long learning would be enough to justify the encouragement of learner autonomy.

There is, however, no disputing the potential of the term ‘lifelong learning’ in selling ideas. I recently came across the lovely phrase ‘premature ultimate’ (try googling it!) – ‘a concept or term that provokes such reverence and contains such connotative potency that its invocation tends to silence any further discussion on a matter’ (Brookfield, 1986). Great for selling, in other words, as on the website of the wonderfully named ‘Enjoy TEFL’ , ‘the Global Number 1 Accredited TEFL and Mindfulness Provider’, which manages to pack ‘lifelong learning’, ‘21^st century’, ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ into just two lines. Their current promotion offers two free mindfulness courses when you buy a 120 / 180 hour TEFL course.

Linking ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘21^st century skills’ is standard practice. The Lifelong Learning Programme 2007 – 2013 of the EU had rather vague objectives, but the desirable skills that were listed were largely indistinguishable from other lists of C21 skills / global skill / soft skills: communication competencies, digital competencies, social and emotional skills, and so on (Kaplan, 2016). Coupling the two concepts means that anything loosely connected with the latter can be promoted by association with the former. Two examples. Creativity and lifelong learning are associated in an article by Daniel Xerri (2017) that seeks to ‘mobilise students’ creative thinking’ and to show ‘how the English language classroom can serve as an incubator for an awareness of the need to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education, and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. Xerri is certainly interested in using ‘creativity’ tasks to promote awareness of the first part of the UN’s SDG, but the ‘lifelong learning’ bit is not explored at all. In contrast, Reinders et al (2022) explore in some depth what they mean by ‘lifelong learning’, but the bottom line is the promotion of the use of digital tools in language learning. ‘Lifelong learning’ (or ‘lifewide learning[1]’, as they call it) is just one reason for advocating the use of digital technologies.

Competing with ‘Enjoy TEFL’ for the prize of the crudest invocation of ‘lifelong learning’ is Darren Nicholls, a product manager for Pearson. A promo for some new Pearson proficiency tests describes them as ‘web-based tests [that] first stream students into the appropriate class and then monitor their progress over an extended period of time. Both tests are hosted on a new platform, Test Hub, which supports lifelong learning by bringing together all proficiency assessments under one roof’. Lifelong learning would seem to mean digital homework.

Lifelong learning and CPD

I have often heard myself (and many others) saying that a good teacher is one who never stops learning. It’s the kind of wisdom of online memes. Once you stop learning you start dying, Albert Einstein didn’t actually say, but let’s not worry about attributional details. ‘Enjoy TEFL’ tries to sell its courses by appealing to the same sentiment, and they are not alone. The blurb for an IATEFL Poland webinar says ‘Being networked is of key importance to all professionally active people in the process of lifelong learning …’ A joint LTSIG and TDSIG conference in Istanbul in 2012 waxed lyrical: ‘This is an age of lifelong learning, or ‘perpetual beta’, of learning anywhere, any place, any time’. Professional development is a lifelong obligation and, for those who are super-keen, JALT (the Japanese Association of Language Teachers) has a ‘Lifelong Language Learning Special Interest Group’ which organises events and a regular newsletter.

All well and good, you may be thinking, but pause a moment to think about the way in which the discourse of lifelong learning ‘orientates education to the enterprise society where the learner (or the teacher as learner) becomes an entrepreneur of him / herself’ (Olssen, 2006). Never mind that increasing numbers of teachers are on zero-hours contracts or fail to take home the minimum wage, a commitment to lifelong professional development is expected. Where better place to start than next week’s IATEFL conference, with its free, daily mindfulness workshops? If you’re based in the UK and working at one of the many language schools that pays the minimum wage, you’ll only need to clock up about 100 hours of teaching to afford it.

References

Brookfield, S. (1986) Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey – Bass

Dam, L. (2002) Developing learner autonomy – preparing learners for lifelong learning. In Pulverness, A. (Ed.) IATEFL 2002 York Conference Selections. Whitstable, Kent: IATEFL

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan.

Faure, E. (1972) Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow. Paris: UNESCO.

Fleming, T. (2011) Models of Lifelong Learning: An Overview. In M. London (Ed.). Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning (pp. 29-39). New York: Oxford University Press.

FutureLearn (2022) The Future of Learning Report 2022. London: FutureLearn https://www.futurelearn.com/info/thefutureoflearning

Guo-Dong, X. (1994) Lifelong education in China: new policies and activities. International Review of Education, 40, (3-5)

Jackson, N. J. (Ed.) (2011) Learning for a complex world: A lifewide concept of learning, development and achievement. AuthorHouse Publishing. Available at: https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/learning-for-a-complex-world.html

Kaplan, A. (2016) Lifelong Learning: Conclusions From A Literature Review. International Online Journal of Primary Education, 5 (2): pp. 43 – 50

Matheson, D. & Matheson, C. (1996) Lifelong Learning and Lifelong Education: a critique. Research in Post‐Compulsory Education, 1 (2): pp. 219-236, DOI: 10.1080/1359674960010207

Olssen, M. (2006) Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 25 (3): pp. 213-230.

Ravitch, D. (2012) The United States of Pearson? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/07/the-united-states-of-pearson-2/

Reinders, H., Dudeney, G., & Lamb, M. (2022) Using Technology to Motivate Learners. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sellar, S., Hogan, A. & Lingard, B. (2016) Always Learning. Education International https://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/21091:always-learning

Xerri, D. (2017) Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. In Maley, A. & Peachey, N. (Eds.) Integrating global issues in the creative English language classroom: With reference to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. London: British Council, pp. 49 – 56

---

[1] ‘Lifewide learning’ is not a term made up by Reinders et al. The idea has been around for over 20 years, piggy-backing on lifelong learning, and referring to the fact that learning takes place in a variety of different environments and situations. For more information, see Jackson (2011). And, if you really have nothing better to do, check out ‘lifedeep learning’. I thought, at first, it was a joke, but it’s been written about in all seriousness.

Doing critical thinking to others

There’s a video on YouTube from Oxford University Press in which the presenter, the author of a coursebook for primary English language learners (‘Oxford Discover’), describes an activity where students have a short time to write some sentences about a picture they have been shown. Then, working in pairs, they read aloud their partner’s sentences and award themselves points, with more points being given for sentences that others have not come up with. For lower level, young learners, it’s not a bad activity. It provides opportunities for varied skills practice of a limited kind and, if it works, may be quite fun and motivating. However, what I found interesting about the video is that it is entitled ‘How to teach critical thinking skills: speaking’ and the book that is being promoted claims to develop ‘21st Century Skills in critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity’. The presenter says that the activity achieves its critical thinking goals by promoting ‘both noticing and giving opinions, […] two very important critical thinking skills.’

Noticing (or observation) and giving opinions are often included in lists of critical thinking skills, but, for this to be the case, they must presumably be exercised in a critical way – some sort of reasoning must be involved. This is not the case here, so only the most uncritical understanding of critical thinking could consider this activity to have any connection to critical thinking. Whatever other benefits might accrue from it, it seems highly unlikely that the students’ ability to notice or express opinions will be developed.

My scepticism is not shared by many users of the book. Oxford University Press carried out a scientific-sounding ‘impact study’: this consisted of a questionnaire (n = 198) in which ‘97% of teachers reported that using Oxford Discover helps their students to improve in the full range of 21st century skills, with critical thinking and communication scoring the highest’.

Enthusiasm for critical thinking activities is extremely widespread. In 2018, TALIS, the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (with more than 4000 respondents) found that ‘over 80% of teachers feel confident in their ability to vary instructional strategies in their classroom and help students think critically’ and almost 60% ‘frequently or always’ ‘give students tasks that require students to think critically.’ Like the Oxford ‘impact study’, it’s worth remembering that these are self-reporting figures.

This enthusiasm is shared in the world of English language teaching, reflected in at least 17 presentations at the 2021 IATEFL conference that discussed practical ideas for promoting critical thinking. These ranged from the more familiar (e.g. textual analysis in EAP) to the more original – developing critical thinking through the use of reading reaction journals, multicultural literature, fables, creative arts performances, self-expression, escape rooms, and dice games.

In most cases, it would appear that the precise nature of the critical thinking that was ostensibly being developed was left fairly vague. This vagueness is not surprising. Practically the only thing that writers about critical thinking in education can agree on is that there is no general agreement about what, precisely, critical thinking is. Lai (2011) offers an accessible summary of a range of possible meanings, but points out that, in educational contexts, its meaning is often rather vague and encompasses other concepts (such as higher order thinking skills) which also lack clarity. Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) plump for ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’ – a vague definition which leaves unanswered two key questions: to what extent is it a skill set or a disposition? Are these skills generic or domain specific?

When ‘critical thinking’ is left undefined, it is impossible to evaluate the claims that a particular classroom activity will contribute to the development of critical thinking. However, irrespective of the definition, there are good reasons to be sceptical about the ability of educational activities to have a positive impact on the generic critical thinking skills of learners in English language classes. There can only be critical-thinking value in the activity described at the beginning of this post if learners somehow transfer the skills they practise in the activity to other domains of their lives. This is, of course, possible, but, if we approach the question with a critical disposition, we have to conclude that it is unlikely. We may continue to believe the opposite, but this would be an uncritical act of faith.

The research evidence on the efficacy of teaching generic critical thinking is not terribly encouraging (Tricot & Sweller, 2014). There’s no shortage of anecdotal support for classroom critical thinking, but ‘education researchers have spent over a century searching for, and failing to find evidence of, transfer to unrelated domains by the use of generic-cognitive skills’ (Sweller, 2022). One recent meta-analysis (Huber & Kuncel, 2016) found insufficient evidence to justify the explicit teaching of generic critical thinking skills at college level. In an earlier blog post https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/fake-news-and-critical-thinking-in-elt/ looking at the impact of critical thinking activities on our susceptibility to fake news, I noted that research was unable to find much evidence of the value of media literacy training. When considerable time is devoted to generic critical thinking training and little or no impact is found, how likely is it that the kind of occasional, brief one-off activity in the ELT classroom will have the desired impact? Without going as far as to say that critical thinking activities in the ELT classroom have no critical-thinking value, it is uncontentious to say that we still do not know how to define critical thinking, how to assess evidence of it, or how to effectively practise and execute it (Gay & Clark, 2021).

It is ironic that there is so little critical thinking about critical thinking in the world of English language teaching, but it should not be particularly surprising. Teachers are no more immune to fads than anyone else (Fuertes-Prieto et al., 2020). Despite a complete lack of robust evidence to support them, learning styles and multiple intelligences influenced language teaching for many years. Mindfulness, growth mindsets, grit are more contemporary influences and, like critical thinking, will go the way of learning styles when the commercial and institutional forces that currently promote them find the lack of empirical supporting evidence problematic.

Critical thinking is an educational aim shared by educational authorities around the world, promoted by intergovernmental bodies like the OECD, the World Bank, the EU, and the United Nations. In Japan, for example, the ‘Ministry of Education (MEXT) puts critical thinking (CT) at the forefront of its ‘global jinzai’ (human capital for a global society) directive’ (Gay & Clark, 2021). It is taught as an academic discipline in some universities in Russia (Ivlev et al, 2021) and plans are underway to introduce it into schools in Saudi Arabia. https://www.arabnews.com/node/1764601/saudi-arabia I suspect that it doesn’t mean quite the same thing in all these places.

Critical thinking is also an educational aim that most teachers can share. Few like to think of themselves as Gradgrinds, bashing facts into their pupils’ heads: turning children into critical thinkers is what education is supposed to be all about. It holds an intuitive appeal, and even if we (20% of teachers in the TALIS survey) lack confidence in our ability to promote critical thinking in the classroom, few of us doubt the importance of trying to do so. Like learning styles, multiple intelligences and growth mindsets, it seems possible that, with critical thinking, we are pushing the wrong thing, but for the right reasons. But just how much evidence, or lack of evidence, do we need before we start getting critical about critical thinking?

References

Dummett, P. & Hughes, J. (2019) Critical Thinking in ELT. Boston: National Geographic Learning

Fuertes-Prieto, M.Á., Andrés-Sánchez, S., Corrochano-Fernández, D. et al. (2020) Pre-service Teachers’ False Beliefs in Superstitions and Pseudosciences in Relation to Science and Technology. Science & Education 29, 1235–1254 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00140-8

Gay, S. & Clark, G. (2021) Revisiting Critical Thinking Constructs and What This Means for ELT. Critical Thinking and Language Learning, 8 (1): pp. 110 – 147

Huber, C.R. & Kuncel, N.R. (2016) Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research. 2016: 86 (2) pp.:431-468. doi:10.3102/0034654315605917

Ivlev, V. Y., Pozdnyakov, M. V., Inozemtsez, V. A. & Chernyak, A. Z. (2021) Critical Thinking in the Structure of Educational Programs in Russian Universities. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 555: pp. 121 -128

Lai, E.R. 2011. Critical Thinking: A Literature Review. Pearson. http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/CriticalThinkingReviewFINAL.pdf

Sweller, J. (2022) Some Critical Thoughts about Critical and Creative Thinking. Sydney: The Centre for Independent Studies Analysis Paper 32

Tricot, A., & Sweller, J. (2014) Domain-specific knowledge and why teaching generic skills does not work. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 265- 283.

Innovation is great

Innovation and ELT

Next week sees the prize ceremony of the nineteenth edition of the British Council’s ELTons awards, celebrating ‘innovation in English language teaching and learning … the newest and most original courses, books, publications, apps, platforms, projects, and more.’ Since the Council launched the ELTons in 2003, it hasn’t been entirely clear what is meant by ‘innovation’. But, reflecting the use of the term in the wider (business) world, ‘innovation’ was seen as a positive value, an inherently good thing, and almost invariably connected to technological innovation. One of the award categories in the ELTons is for ‘digital innovation’, but many of the winners and shortlisted nominations in other categories have been primarily innovative in their use of technology (at first, CD-ROMs, before web-based applications became standard).

Historian Jill Lepore, among others, has traced the mantra of innovation at the start of this century back to renewed interest in the work of mid-20^th century Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, in the 1990s. Schumpeter wrote about ‘creative disruption’, and his ideas gained widespread traction with the publication in 1997 of Clayton Christensen’s ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business’. Under Christensen, ‘creative disruption’ morphed into ‘disruptive innovation’. The idea was memorably expressed in Facebook’s motto of ‘Move fast and break things’. Disruptive innovation was always centrally concerned with expanding the market for commercial products by leveraging technology to gain access to more customers. Innovation, then, was and is a commercial strategy, and could be used either in product development or simply as an advertising slogan.

From the start of the innovation wave, the British Council has been keen to position itself in the vanguard. It does this for two reasons. Firstly, it needs to promote its own products and, with the cuts to British Council funding, its need to generate more income is increasingly urgent: ELT products are the main source of this income. Secondly, as part of the Council’s role in pushing British ‘soft power’, it seeks to promote Britain as a desirable, and therefore innovative, place to do business or study. This is wonderfully reflected in a series of videos for the Council’s LearnEnglish website called ‘Britain is Great’, subsets of which are entitled ‘Entrepreneurs are GREAT’ and ‘Innovation is GREAT’ with films celebrating the work of people like Richard Branson and James Dyson. For a while, the Council had a ‘Director, English Language Innovation’, and the current senior management team includes a ‘Director Digital, Partnerships and Innovation’ and a ‘Director Transformation’. With such a focus on innovation at the heart of its organisation, it is hardly surprising that the British Council should celebrate the idea in its ELTons awards. The ELTons celebrate the Council itself, and its core message, as much as they do the achievements of the award winners. Finalists in the ELTons receive a ‘promotional kit’ which includes ‘assets for the promotion of products or publications’. These assets (badges, banners, and so on) serve to promote the Council brand at the same time as advertising the shortlisted products themselves.

Innovation and a better world

Innovation, especially ‘disruptive innovation’, is not, however, what it used to be. The work of Clayton Christensen has been largely discredited (Russell & Vinsel, 2016). The Facebook motto has been changed and ‘the Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over’ (Taneja, 2019). The interest in ‘minimal viable products’ has shifted to an interest in ‘minimal virtuous products’. This is reflected in the marketing of edtech with the growing focus on how product X or Y will make the world a better place in some way. The ELTons introduced ‘Judges’ Commendations’ for ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ and, this year, a new commendation for ‘Environmental Sustainability and Climate Action’. Innovation is still celebrated, but ‘disruption’ has undergone a slide of meaning, so that it is more likely now to refer to disruption caused by the Covid pandemic, and our responses to it. For example, TESOL Italy’s upcoming annual conference, entitled ‘Disruptive Innovations in ELT’, encourages contributions not only about online study and ‘interactive e-learning platforms’, but also about ‘sustainable development and social justice’, ‘resilience, collaboration, empathy, digital literacy, soft skills, and global competencies’. Innovation is still presented as a good, even necessary, thing.

I am not suggesting that the conflation of innovation with positive social good is purely virtue-signalling, although it is sometimes clearly that. However, the rhetorical shift makes it harder for anyone to criticise innovations, when they are presented as solutions to problems that need to be solved. Allen et al (2021) argue that ‘those who propose solutions are always virtuous because they clearly care about a problem we must solve. Those who suggest the solution will not work, and who have no better solution, are denying the problem the opportunity of the resolution it so desperately needs’.

There are, though, good reasons to be wary of ‘innovation’ in education. First among these is the lessons of history, which teach us that today’s ‘next big thing’ is usually tomorrow’s ‘last next big thing’ (Allen, et al., 2021). On the technology front, from programmed instruction to interactive whiteboards, educational history is littered with artefacts that have been oversold and underused (Cuban, 2001). Away from technology, from Multiple Intelligences to personalized learning, we see the same waves of enthusiasm and widespread adoption, followed by waning interest and abandonment. The waste of money and effort along the way has been colossal, although that is not to say that there have not been some, sometimes significant, gains.

The second big reason to be wary of technological innovations in education is that they focus our attention on products of various kinds. But products are not at the heart of schooling: it is labour, especially the work of teachers, which occupies that place. It is not Zoom that made possible the continuation of education during the pandemic lockdowns. Indeed, in many parts of the world, lower-tech or zero-tech solutions had to be found. It was teachers’ readiness to adapt to the new circumstances that allowed education to stumble onwards during the crisis. Vinsel and Russell’s recent book, ‘The Innovation Delusion’ (2021) compellingly argues that the focus on innovation has led us to ‘devalue the work that underpins modern life’. They point out (Russell and Vinsel, 2016) that ‘feminist theorists have long argued that obsessions with technological novelty obscures all of the labour, including housework, that women, disproportionately, do to keep life on track’. Parallels with the relationship between teachers and technology are hard to avoid. The presentation of innovation as an inherently desirable value ‘rarely asks who benefits, to what end?’

The ‘ELT’ in the ELTons

It’s time to consider the ‘ELT’ part of the ELTons. ‘ELT’ is a hypothetical construct that is often presented as a concrete reality, rather than a loosely-bound constellation of a huge number of different practices and attitudes, many of which have very little in common with each other. This reification of ‘ELT’ can serve a number of purposes, one of which is to frame discourse in particular ways. In a post from a few years ago, Andrew Wickham and I discussed how the framing of ‘ELT’ (and education, more generally) as an industry serves particular interests, but may be detrimental to the interests of others.

Perhaps a useful way of viewing ‘ELT’ is as a discourse community. Borg (2003) argues that ‘membership of a discourse community is usually a matter of choice’. That is to say that you are part of ‘ELT’ if you choose to identify yourself as such. In Europe, huge numbers of English language teachers do not choose to identify themselves primarily as an ‘ELT teacher’: they may see this label as relevant to them, but a more immediate and primary self-identification is often as a ‘school teacher’, a ‘primary school teacher’, a ‘(modern) languages teacher’, a ‘CLIL teacher’, and so on. They work in the state / public sectors. The concerns and interests of those who do not self-identify as ‘ELT practitioners’ are most likely to revolve around their local contexts and issues. Those of us who self-identify as ‘ELT practitioners’ are more likely to be interested in what we share with others who self-identify in the same way in different parts of the globe. The relevance of local contexts and issues is mostly to be found in how they may shed light on more global concerns. If you prioritise the local over the global, your participation in the ‘ELT’ discourse community is likely to be limited. Things like the ELTons are simply off your radar.

Borg (2003) also points out that discourse communities typically have ‘experts who perform gatekeeping roles’. The discourse of ‘ELT’ is enacted in magazines, blogs, videos, webinars and conferences aimed at English language teachers. I exclude from this list academic journals and books which are known to be consulted only rarely by the vast majority of teachers. Similarly, I exclude the more accessible books that have been written specifically for English language teachers, which are mostly sold in minuscule quantities, except for those that are required reading for training courses. The greatest number of contributors to the discourse of ‘ELT’ are authors, developers and publishers of language teaching materials and tools, teachers representing product vendors or (directly or indirectly) promoting their own products, representatives of private teaching / training schools, and organisations, representatives of international examination bodies, and representatives of universities (which, in some countries, essentially function as private institutions (Chowdhury & Ha, 2014)).

In other words, the discourse of ‘ELT’ is shaped to a very significant extent by gatekeepers who have a product to sell. Their customers are often those who do not self-identify in the same way as members of the ‘ELT’ discourse community. The British Council is a key gatekeeper in this discourse and it is a private sector operator par excellence.

The lack of interest in the workers of ‘ELT’ is well documented – see for example the Teachers as Workers blog. It is hardly unexpected, especially in the private sector. The British Council has a long history of labour disputes. At the present time, the Public and Commercial Services Union in the UK is balloting members about strike action against forced redundancies, which ‘are disproportionately targeted at middle to lower graded staff, while at the same time new management positions and a new deputy chief executive officer post are to be created’. One of the aims of the union is to stop the privatisation / outsourcing of Council jobs. The British government’s recent failure to relocate British Council employees in Afghanistan led to over 100,000 people signing a petition demanding action. The public silence of the British Council did little to inspire confidence in their interest in their workers.

The Council is a many-headed beast, and some of these heads do very admirable work in sponsoring or supporting a large variety of valuable projects. I don’t think the ELTons is one of these. The ideology behind them is highly questionable, and their ‘best before’ date has long expired. And given the financial constraints that the Council is now operating under, the money might be better spent elsewhere.

References

Allen, R., Evans, M. & White, B. (2021) The Next Big Thing in School Improvement. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational

Borg, E. (2003) Discourse Community. ELT Journal 57 (4): 398-400

Chowdhury, R. & Ha, P. L. (2014) Desiring TESOL and International Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Christensen, C. M. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business. Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press

Cuban, L. (2001) Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Lepore, J. (2014) The Disruption Machine. The New Yorker, June 16, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine

Russell, A. L. & Vinsel, L. (2016) Hail the Maintainers. Aeon, 7 April 2016 https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more

Taneja, H. (2019) The Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over. Harvard Business Review, January 22, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over

Vinsel, L. & Russell, A. L. (2020) The Innovation Delusion. New York: Currency Books

More research needed: part 2

In my last post, I looked at shortcomings in edtech research, mostly from outside the world of ELT. I made a series of recommendations of ways in which such research could become more useful. In this post, I look at two very recent collections of ELT edtech research. The first of these is Digital Innovations and Research in Language Learning, edited by Mavridi and Saumell, and published this February by the Learning Technologies SIG of IATEFL. I’ll refer to it here as DIRLL. It’s available free to IATEFL LT SIG members, and can be bought for $10.97 as an ebook on Amazon (US). The second is the most recent edition (February 2020) of the Language Learning & Technology journal, which is open access and available here. I’ll refer to it here as LLTJ.

In both of these collections, the focus is not on ‘technology per se, but rather issues related to language learning and language teaching, and how they are affected or enhanced by the use of digital technologies’. However, they are very different kinds of publication. Nobody involved in the production of DIRLL got paid in any way (to the best of my knowledge) and, in keeping with its provenance from a teachers’ association, has ‘a focus on the practitioner as teacher-researcher’. Almost all of the contributing authors are university-based, but they are typically involved more in language teaching than in research. With one exception (a grant from the EU), their work was unfunded.

The triannual LLTJ is funded by two American universities and published by the University of Hawaii Press. The editors and associate editors are well-known scholars in their fields. The journal’s impact factor is high, close to the impact factor of the paywalled reCALL (published by the University of Cambridge), which is the highest-ranking journal in the field of CALL. The contributing authors are all university-based, many with a string of published articles (in prestige journals), chapters or books behind them. At least six of the studies were funded by national grant-awarding bodies.

I should begin by making clear that there was much in both collections that I found interesting. However, it was not usually the research itself that I found informative, but the literature review that preceded it. Two of the chapters in DIRLL were not really research, anyway. One was the development of a template for evaluating ICT-mediated tasks in CLIL, another was an advocacy of comics as a resource for language teaching. Both of these were new, useful and interesting to me. LLTJ included a valuable literature review of research into VR in FL learning (but no actual new research). With some exceptions in both collections, though, I felt that I would have been better off curtailing my reading after the reviews. Admittedly, there wouldn’t be much in the way of literature reviews if there were no previous research to report …

It was no surprise to see the learners who were the subjects of this research were overwhelmingly university students. In fact, only one article (about a high-school project in Israel, reported in DIRLL) was not about university students. The research areas focused on reflected this bias towards tertiary contexts: online academic reading skills, academic writing, online reflective practices in teacher training programmes, etc.

In a couple of cases, the selection of experimental subjects seemed plain bizarre. Why, if you want to find out about the extent to which Moodle use can help EAP students become better academic readers (in DIRLL), would you investigate this with a small volunteer cohort of postgraduate students of linguistics, with previous experience of using Moodle and experience of teaching? Is a less representative sample imaginable? Why, if you want to investigate the learning potential of the English File Pronunciation app (reported in LLTJ), which is clearly most appropriate for A1 – B1 levels, would you do this with a group of C1-level undergraduates following a course in phonetics as part of an English Studies programme?

More problematic, in my view, was the small sample size in many of the research projects. The Israeli virtual high school project (DIRLL), previously referred to, started out with only 11 students, but 7 dropped out, primarily, it seems, because of institutional incompetence: ‘the project was probably doomed […] to failure from the start’, according to the author. Interesting as this was as an account of how not to set up a project of this kind, it is simply impossible to draw any conclusions from 4 students about the potential of a VLE for ‘interaction, focus and self-paced learning’. The questionnaire investigating experience of and attitudes towards VR (in DIRLL) was completed by only 7 (out of 36 possible) students and 7 (out of 70+ possible) teachers. As the author acknowledges, ‘no great claims can be made’, but then goes on to note the generally ‘positive attitudes to VR’. Perhaps those who did not volunteer had different attitudes? We will never know. The study of motivational videos in tertiary education (DIRLL) started off with 15 subjects, but 5 did not complete the necessary tasks. The research into L1 use in videoconferencing (LLTJ) started off with 10 experimental subjects, all with the same L1 and similar cultural backgrounds, but there was no data available from 4 of them (because they never switched into L1). The author claims that the paper demonstrates ‘how L1 is used by language learners in videoconferencing as a social semiotic resource to support social presence’ – something which, after reading the literature review, we already knew. But the paper also demonstrates quite clearly how L1 is not used by language learners in videoconferencing as a social semiotic resource to support social presence. In all these cases, it is the participants who did not complete or the potential participants who did not want to take part that have the greatest interest for me.

Unsurprisingly, the LLTJ articles had larger sample sizes than those in DIRLL, but in both collections the length of the research was limited. The production of one motivational video (DIRLL) does not really allow us to draw any conclusions about the development of students’ critical thinking skills. Two four-week interventions do not really seem long enough to me to discover anything about learner autonomy and Moodle (DIRLL). An experiment looking at different feedback modes needs more than two written assignments to reach any conclusions about student preferences (LLTJ).

More research might well be needed to compensate for the short-term projects with small sample sizes, but I’m not convinced that this is always the case. Lacking sufficient information about the content of the technologically-mediated tools being used, I was often unable to reach any conclusions. A gamified Twitter environment was developed in one project (DIRLL), using principles derived from contemporary literature on gamification. The authors concluded that the game design ‘failed to generate interaction among students’, but without knowing a lot more about the specific details of the activity, it is impossible to say whether the problem was the principles or the particular instantiation of those principles. Another project, looking at the development of pronunciation materials for online learning (LLTJ), came to the conclusion that online pronunciation training was helpful – better than none at all. Claims are then made about the value of the method used (called ‘innovative Cued Pronunciation Readings’), but this is not compared to any other method / materials, and only a very small selection of these materials are illustrated. Basically, the reader of this research has no choice but to take things on trust. The study looking at the use of Alexa to help listening comprehension and speaking fluency (LLTJ) cannot really tell us anything about IPAs unless we know more about the particular way that Alexa is being used. Here, it seems that the students were using Alexa in an interactive storytelling exercise, but so little information is given about the exercise itself that I didn’t actually learn anything at all. The author’s own conclusion is that the results, such as they are, need to be treated with caution. Nevertheless, he adds ‘the current study illustrates that IPAs may have some value to foreign language learners’.

This brings me onto my final gripe. To be told that IPAs like Alexa may have some value to foreign language learners is to be told something that I already know. This wasn’t the only time this happened during my reading of these collections. I appreciate that research cannot always tell us something new and interesting, but a little more often would be nice. I ‘learnt’ that goal-setting plays an important role in motivation and that gamification can boost short-term motivation. I ‘learnt’ that reflective journals can take a long time for teachers to look at, and that reflective video journals are also very time-consuming. I ‘learnt’ that peer feedback can be very useful. I ‘learnt’ from two papers that intercultural difficulties may be exacerbated by online communication. I ‘learnt’ that text-to-speech software is pretty good these days. I ‘learnt’ that multimodal literacy can, most frequently, be divided up into visual and auditory forms.

With the exception of a piece about online safety issues (DIRLL), I did not once encounter anything which hinted that there may be problems in using technology. No mention of the use to which student data might be put. No mention of the costs involved (except for the observation that many students would not be happy to spend money on the English File Pronunciation app) or the cost-effectiveness of digital ‘solutions’. No consideration of the institutional (or other) pressures (or the reasons behind them) that may be applied to encourage teachers to ‘leverage’ edtech. No suggestion that a zero-tech option might actually be preferable. In both collections, the language used is invariably positive, or, at least, technology is associated with positive things: uncovering the possibilities, promoting autonomy, etc. Even if the focus of these publications is not on technology per se (although I think this claim doesn’t really stand up to close examination), it’s a little disingenuous to claim (as LLTJ does) that the interest is in how language learning and language teaching is ‘affected or enhanced by the use of digital technologies’. The reality is that the overwhelming interest is in potential enhancements, not potential negative effects.

I have deliberately not mentioned any names in referring to the articles I have discussed. I would, though, like to take my hat off to the editors of DIRLL, Sophia Mavridi and Vicky Saumell, for attempting to do something a little different. I think that Alicia Artusi and Graham Stanley’s article (DIRLL) about CPD for ‘remote’ teachers was very good and should interest the huge number of teachers working online. Chryssa Themelis and Julie-Ann Sime have kindled my interest in the potential of comics as a learning resource (DIRLL). Yu-Ju Lan’s article about VR (LLTJ) is surely the most up-to-date, go-to article on this topic. There were other pieces, or parts of pieces, that I liked, too. But, to me, it’s clear that ‘more research is needed’ … much less than (1) better and more critical research, and (2) more digestible summaries of research.