Many learners are now quite digitally skilled. However, this does not entail that they know how to learn through digital technologies. Therefore, establishing an interactive virtual learning platform that connects everyone together in a classroom environment and helping learners become familiar with such media might serve a set of purposes in any educational setting. Today, with the advances in web-based learning technologies, a hybrid teaching methodology has become widespread: blended learning. It is a term used to describe the way e-learning is being combined with traditional classroom methods and independent study. Educators design online materials and utilize them in synchronous or asynchronous ways to suit the convenience of learners and instructors and program demands. In this study with a group of intermediate-level English language learners at the School of Foreign Languages of an English-medium state university, the goal was to enhance students' vocabulary learning performance by using synchronous and asynchronous games and activities that will activate and maintain intrinsic motivation in an effort to teach parts of speech and collocations over a period of eight weeks. The data consisted of a survey of students' reflections on their vocabulary learning experiences through digital games and activities. The findings were discussed with respect to the efficiency of incorporating synchronous and asynchronous learning materials.

The global pandemic forced educational institutions worldwide to adapt to a new, fully online concept of education and a rapid digitalization to keep providing their services to learners. This paper reports on the digitalization process of the Independent Learning Center (ILC) and the Learning Advisory Program (LAP) unit at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University (AYBU), Turkey. The interrelated digitalization stories of the two units include the provision of learning resources and activities to learners with digital tools and their responses to the new format. Despite the challenges involved, the ILC has offered a considerably higher number of extracurricular activities than in face-to-face education days and reached a higher number of learners in the 2020-2021 academic year. As for the LAP, the participants’ reflections showed how opportunities for offering engaging activities in the LAP created a cascading impact of affordances for both the individual learners and the members of the larger community.

This working paper elaborates on a series of written advising email exchanges conducted with an AYBU-SFL student who volunteered to become an advisee and receive online written advising from one of the researcher-LAs in this study. The study spans a period of seven months, final three months overlapping the pandemic-related lockdown during which instruction at the university was delivered online. The purpose was to exploit the strategies and tools of advising asynchronously via email utilizing Intentional Reflective Dialogue (IRD) to promote deeper reflection, while at the same time facilitating advisee engagement and encouraging advisee ownership by considering certain motivational processes, including emphasizing effort, creating hope, respecting power, building relationships, expressing enthusiasm, challenging and prompting. In the paper, the context and background, and the purpose are introduced briefly. Then the motivational processes used are presented with reference to the written advising data pointing out and illustrating how motivation-boosting elements were incorporated in this series of IRD email exchanges. Finally, the impact of exploiting motivational resources is further discussed so as to bring insights to how advisors’ focus on motivational elements while conducting advising sessions influence the overall flow with respect to advisee engagement and ownership of the process.

One’s identity formation process as a learning advisor is inevitably determined or molded by her or his personality features that stand out. It is often these prominent characteristics that dominate her or his understanding of and attitude towards the science and practice of language advising although it is very likely that the formal advisor training content often helps surface relatively dormant qualities as well. In this respect, the focus in this visual message board is how nineteen learning advisors from Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University School of Foreign Languages (AYBU-SFL) and one from the Middle East Technical University School of Foreign Languages (METU-SFL) define their advisor selves with reference to their most prominent characteristics as reflected in their end-of-the-course thank you and appreciation cards designed by their trainers.

In the Reflective Practice column of the third issue of the Relay Journal, Yamamoto (2019) remarked on the importance of creating a platform for advisors to voice their views, feelings, and experiences, and suggested a need for more reflective narratives to be posted from different social, historical, and cultural contexts in order to provide an intimate view inside advising sessions, thereby offering a better understanding of said advising practices. The aim was to create a forum where advisors could learn from each other, and ultimately, everyone could mutually benefit from the experiences shared. To further this innovative research into Advising in Language Learning (ALL), the initial experiment by language advsiors at Kanda has been replicated in a different setting with four learning advisors from Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Turkey. The design used by the advisors at Kanda, a narrative style adopted while telling the stories, has been expanded to include a visual message board to which 20 learning advisors have contributed with their short reflective captions on their advisor selves. Additionally, the theme used by the advisors at Kanda, “the most memorable advising experience of this academic year” has been altered in our case to avoid repetition and to allow reflection on different aspects of the advising experiences. Thus, our narratives and the visual message board will examine two different themes: (1) How has advising affected you? (2) How do you define yourself as an advisor? Four narratives have elaborated on the first theme of the influence of advising knowledge and practice on the individual advisors, and the visual message board includes 20 images with reflective captions on the second theme of defining advisor identities.