This work gathers international contributors in educational technology and bilingual and foreign language education at elementary through secondary and higher education levels. They detail the latest advances and cases in the use of digital technology for teaching languages. Sections cover technologies and their use in many countries, web collaboration across languages, and less commonly taught languages. The final section deals with teacher education and learning strategies. Some topics include Mexican heritage ELL and native English speaker interaction, Yiddish in the 21st century, creating a micro-immersion environment through telecollaboration, flipped and hybrid classrooms for language teaching, student interpretations of French native speakers’ tweets, and the impact of blog peer feedback on improving Iranian English students’ writing. The book contains b&w photos and screenshots.
– ProtoView Reviews
[...]. This reference text explores current research, innovative pedagogy, trends, models, and approaches from multidisciplinary global perspectives. Case studies, such as chapter two which examines Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC), examine the feasibility of intertwining language studies with technology. Content management systems, mobile devices, social media, website content builders, video, text documents, discussion boards, and audio can represent incredible opportunity for second language but can also represent barriers. The handbook also evaluates characterizing culture, heritage, and identity while using online sources. Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese are more common languages discussed, and section four is devoted to marginalized languages resulting in a very broad usage potential.
Usual front matter is enhanced with both a "Table of Contents” and a “Detailed Table of Contents” where 17 chapters are represented with descriptions that will be useful to researchers unsure of what they need and also those who are seeking a specific vein of language and technology instruction. The five sections include: section one, Commentary; section two, Technologies across Continents; section three, Web Collaboration across Language; section four, Less Commonly Taught Languages; and section five, Teacher Education and Learning Strategies. Chapters are divided into efficient headings such as “Introduction”, “References”, and “Additional Reading,” and also include, at times, practical information including glossary terms or pedagogical implications for teachers’ classroom or virtual use. “Back Matter” provides a “Compilation of References,” “About the Contributors,” and an “Index.”
Living in a global society, language acquisition is imperative for business people, leaders, and others with worldwide communication interests. The Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the DigitalAgeis a very useful guide for the expansion of language education in the context of today’s and future technologies and will be well loved by world language scholars and professors, as well as technology lovers seeking to understand how current digital devices and applications improve language studies and how this interplay will work in the future.
– Janis Minshull, ARBA Reviews