advances in digital technologies. To these three factors, a fourth must also be added-namely, the unprecedented global health crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has given educators first-hand knowledge of the extent to which curricular changes can be influenced by and are manifestations of social forces. The pandemic has changed educational curricula and how learners are being educated on a global scale (UNESCO, 2020). It has placed the use of digital technologies and online education at the forefront of concerns about how to design and deliver effective online instruction.Within the context of language teaching and learning, one of the online instruction
In recent years, many automatic speech recognition (ASR) programs have been developed for a wide range of pronunciation teaching and learning needs. This entry gives a broad overview of the advantages that current technology has in terms of teaching pronunciation, as reported by English learners, teachers, and researchers. The entry also attempts to summarize the criticisms. While technology does show a lot of promise for the teaching of English pronunciation, many agree that the key to making use of it is careful pedagogical planning. Such planning will likely require that English language teachers expand their knowledge of ASR systems and of how technology can be beneficial for improving English pronunciation in their particular classrooms.
The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (1) to review the benefits of digital game-based language learning (DGBLL), specifically massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), and (2) to present research investigating the design elements of MMOs that can be beneficial for second language acquisition (SLA). Data were gathered from volunteer ESL learners playing the MMO Guild Wars 2 over the course of four weeks. The findings from the research indicate that MMOs with design elements like Guild Wars 2 are beneficial to SLA primarily because they provide opportunities for interaction in the target language through participation in collaborative problem-solving gaming tasks. The results of the research presented in this chapter show (1) that the requirements of input and output for successful gaming allow for a type of interaction in which the focus on language form leads to modified-output, (2) that players have opportunities to negotiate input as a means of completing in-game tasks, and (3) that in-game tasks resemble well-designed classroom instructional tasks believed to be beneficial for SLA.
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