Recent research indicates that Web 2.0 applications contribute to supporting a social constructivist approach for language learning. However, students encounter different types of barrier associated with technologies and learning tasks, which can cause disengagement during different phases of learning. Thus, based on flow theory and the strategic motivation framework, this study aims to investigate students’ motivation and their engagement patterns while participating in Web 2.0 digital storytelling activities. The participants are 24 elementary school students of a suburban school in northern Taiwan. Over 19 weeks of observations on students aged 9–10 years in a third-grade classroom, data were collected through three sources: surveys, students’ digital stories, and English tests. The analysis of the data showed that motivation was a dynamic process, initially low but increasing in later phases. A dynamic pattern was also identified in the students’ flow perceptions, which included two cycles of disengagement and reengagement. Students encountered different challenges that led to disengagement phases, which highlighted the need for specific types of learning support in elementary school contexts. In addition, the participants’ vocabulary and oral fluency were found to have been enhanced by the end of the study. The implications for educational practice are discussed and the direction for future studies addressed.

Undergraduate students whose programme includes a full academic year on an Erasmus study visit require a range of support before, during and after their year abroad. This study focuses on the support provided by the home academic coordinator during the students’ period of study abroad. The research is based on a case-study which explores how the maintenance of an online journal can enhance students’ new learning experiences. The outcomes of this investigation are of interest at a pragmatic level to Erasmus coordinators and educational institutions whose programmes include a study visit or an internship. At a theoretical level, this study brings together a number of areas that have each been the subject of prior research but that so far have not been pulled together, particularly in the context of a study visit to a foreign country. The areas referred to include the benefits and challenges of rolling out educational online journals; the use of blogging in language learning; the design of rubrics as a form of feedback and the activity of reflective writing in an online environment. The findings and the discussion show how the online journal has added a positive dimension to the year abroad, particularly in the areas of communication and feedback, peer support, language learning and technology.

This paper introduces an open learner model approach to learning analytics to combine the variety of data available from the range of applications and technologies in language learning, for visualisation of language learning competences to learners and teachers in the European language context. Specific examples are provided as illustrations (Facebook, Second Life and mobile assisted language learning (MALL)), though the approach is a general one. We describe the Next-TELL open learner model as an exemplar that can encompass a range of data from a variety of technologies and activities, and as a competence-focussed visual analytics tool that can be readily used inside and outside the classroom.

The Next-TELL open learner model offers several visualisations for learners and teachers to explore the learner’s current competences, which can be selected according to user preferences or the purpose of viewing the learning data. The selection of visualisations means that the open learner model is appropriate for school, university and other learning contexts. Viewing this data can help students to reflect on and monitor their learning, and can support teachers’ decision-making during classroom activities or later, in their planning of subsequent sessions. As an example, we outline the use of the Next-TELL open learner model in a school in Norway.

Within the field of computer assisted language learning (CALL), scant literature exists regarding the effectiveness and practicality for secondary students to utilize data-driven learning (DDL) for vocabulary acquisition. In this study, there were 100 participants, who had a mean age of thirteen years, and were attending an international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This particular milieu unsurprisingly comprised ‘third culture kids’ (TCKs) and ‘cross-cultural kids’ (CCKs). They were assigned to a control and experimental group; both had several intensive weeks of online-dictionary learning training, while the experimental group also experienced intensive DDL training. This was done prior to the start of the eight-week longitudinal study. Major findings included a significant longitudinal main effect for both groups, significantly overall higher results for the experimental group than the control, and a significant difference among subjects’ grade level was discovered. Furthermore, the experimental group exhibited a significantly marked increase in vocabulary results in the later weeks of the experiment. In general, these results show that DDL can be successful in the secondary school English as a foreign language (EFL) context and that it promotes significantly better vocabulary acquisition when used in conjunction with online-dictionary vocabulary learning methods, especially for a sustained longitudinal period of time.

This article presents the first study on using a parallel corpus to teach Cantonese, the variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong. We evaluated this approach with Mandarin-speaking undergraduate students at the beginner level. Exploiting their knowledge of Mandarin, a closely related language, the students studied Cantonese with authentic material in a Cantonese-Mandarin parallel corpus, transcribed from television programs. They were given a list of Mandarin words that yield a range of possible Cantonese translations, depending on the linguistic context. Leveraging sentence and word alignments in the parallel corpus, the students independently searched for example sentences to discover these translation equivalents. Experimental results showed that, in both the short- and long-term, this data-driven learning approach helped students improve their knowledge of Cantonese vocabulary. These results suggest the potential of applying parallel corpora at even the beginners’ level for other L1-L2 pairs of closely related languages.

Research on data-driven learning (DDL), or teaching and learning languages with the help of electronic corpora, has shown that it is both effective and efficient. Nevertheless, DDL is still far from common pedagogical practice, not least because the empirical research on it is still limited and narrowly focused. This study addresses some gaps in that research by exploring the effectiveness of DDL for teaching low-proficiency learners lexico-grammatical constructions (verb-preposition collocations) in German, a morphologically rich language. The study employed a pretest-posttest design with intact third- and fourth-semester classes for German as a foreign language at a US university. The same collocations were taught to each group during one class period, with one group at each course level taking a paper-based DDL lesson with concordance lines from a native-speaker corpus and the other one taking a traditional rule-based lesson with textbook exercises. These constructions were new to third-semester students, whereas fourth-semester students had been exposed to them in the previous semester. The results show that, whereas the DDL method and the traditional method were both effective and resulted in lexical and grammatical gains, DDL was more effective for teaching new collocations. The study thus argues in favor of using paper-based DDL in the classroom at lower proficiency levels and for languages other than English.

In spite of researchers’ and practitioners’ increasing attention to data-driven learning (DDL) and increasing numbers of DDL studies, a multi-item scale to measure learners’ attitude toward DDL has not been developed thus far. In the present study, we developed and validated a psychometric scale to measure learners’ perceived preferences and benefits of DDL for research and pedagogical purposes. First, we created an item pool by referring to open-ended responses from learners; second, the items were pilot tested with target-level learners of English as a foreign language; and third, with item analyses and exploratory factor analysis, the revised version of the questionnaire was prepared. Finally, the questionnaire was administered, and its psychometric properties were examined with confirmatory factor analysis and fit indices. The final phase also included a measure of task values to explore the convergent evidence of the construct validity of the proposed scale. The results suggest that the scale is a valid measure of learners’ attitudes toward DDL, with the hypothesized model providing a good fit with the data. We propose that the scale can be used in future studies that utilize the same type of questionnaire research to facilitate further investigation of DDL. Suggestions for further research are also provided.