Promoting Social Justice With CALL

Over the past 20 years, there have been marked changes in the ways that technology has been used for language learning and teaching. As a result of emerging technologies and their pedagogical applications in the field of applied linguistics, studies in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) have grown exponentially in number and scope. As movement toward integrative CALL, where technological implantation “in every classroom, on every desk, in every bag” (Bax, 2003, p. 21) surely still varies by context, more attention must be paid to the role of CALL in (re)producing issues of power, ideology, and injustice. In light of the affordances that technology provides, including potential access to “open” and “free” tools for language learning (e.g., MOOCs), a small body of critical CALL research has developed (Helm, Bradley, Guarda, & Thouësny, 2015). Critical CALL draws attention to how such resources can work to ameliorate or, in some cases, exacerbate problems of discrimination, marginalization, and inequity (Andrejevic, 2007; Menezes de Souza, 2015). As Ortega (2005) contends, the cornerstones of any scientific paradigm must not only include ontology, epistemology, and methodology, but also axiology; that is, CALL researchers must seek to ask ourselves the question: Who is our research serving? More recently, Ortega (2017) has argued that