Discourses in place: technology and language experts negotiating solutions for a language learning application

Abstract

. This study explores the nature of collaboration between language students and technology developers while designing an application for language teaching. This project was part of a university course on language learning and teaching in technology-rich environments. An important aspect of the course was to help the university students to explore and extend their understandings of language teaching and being language teachers. One of the student teams on the course had the opportunity of acting as language (pedagogy) experts while working with technology experts, negotiating directions for the application under development. Such a collaborative relationship together with the support of the course was expected to provide the participants with new perspectives, helping them to detach themselves from narrow conceptions of language pedagogy. Video materials were stored from different phases of the project. The design concepts and reflection papers produced by the students were also used in the analysis. The research drew on nexus analysis. The findings suggest that multidisciplinary collaboration can be fruitfully integrated into language teacher education to provide the students with experiences and perspectives for assuming an active role in technology development for language learning, and, additionally for seeing this type of cooperation as an essential element of their language teacher professionalism.