History, Pedagogy, Data and New Directions: An Introduction to the Educational Technology Issue

The focus of this 2019 issue of ARAL is educational technology. The issue includes review articles, position articles, empirical articles, and short reports. It is a unique compilation in that, unlike other special issues in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) journals (e.g., CALICO Journal, CALL, Language Learning & Technology, ReCALL, and System) that are specifically devoted to research that reports on a particular aspect of language learning and technology (e.g., computer-mediated communication), the topics covered here are dynamic and wide ranging, as befits the broad field of applied linguistics. Articles here include a commentary on second dialects as well as second languages (L2s), concerns of multilingualism and technology, corpus linguistics and its relationship to second language acquisition (SLA), learner autonomy, current issues in pragmatics, digital discourses, and data mining, as well as two empirical studies dealing with learning contributions of technology-mediated instruction. The authors of these pieces hail from universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, The Netherlands, France, and Japan. Work by senior scholars who have a long history of contributions in this area appears together with work by junior scholars and graduate students, which underscores the variety of viewpoints represented. In this introduction, we provide a short overview of the articles included in this issue with a special focus on the novel and forward-thinking ideas and innovative applications of technologies presented in these contributions. We also highlight the ways in which familiar ideas have been challenged or expanded, or have otherwise evolved with the goal of inspiring new understandings and advances in technology-mediated language learning contexts.