Abstract. Despite abundant research on educational technology and strategic input in the field, various surveys have shown that (language) teachers do not seem to embrace in their teaching the full potential of information and communication technology available in our everyday life. Language students soon entering the professional field could accelerate the process, which highlights the role of teacher education in contributing to the change. The students should see how technology-development may change the affordances for languagelearning, at the same time transforming the teachers' professional roles and practices. However, taking an active role in designing a new kind of language pedagogy seems to be challenging for students. This study explores an attempt to facilitate the students' perspective-switch from the teacher role to the designer position through participatory design. This effort was to lead the students to envisioning new practices for language learning and teaching with new technologies. However, initial analyses of the research materials indicated that despite the support the students were not fully able to see their role as designers for the future. Cultural-historical activity theory was used to examine the problem more closely. The analysis suggests that in order to position themselves as designers of the future language learning activity, language students need to understand their role as designers, conduct real-life experiments on the evolving visions with their learners, and involve learners as participants in the design activity by sharing visions and collaborative reflection on the experiments. The findings of the study provide tools for language teacher educators to make these activity systems visible and, thus, target for change.

Nexus analysis is becoming increasingly employed in a variety of research fields. It is seen to be particularly suited to exploring complex and changing phenomena. It entails a mediated discourse perspective to social action and interaction. In discourse studies, this involves switching the perspective from language to social semiotic meaning making in its full spectrum not only here and now but at the same time reaching across more distant spatial and temporal orientations. As the tradition of nexus analysis is still young there are no established interpretations of how to conduct research with an interest in such complexities in flux. This paper presents a review of studies in which nexus analysis or mediated discourse analysis has been applied in research related to language pedagogy and language teacher education. The review shows how research in the field is in emergence and the interpretations concerning the theoretical-methodological underpinnings vary to some extent.

This study explores the nature of collaboration between language students and technology developers while designing an application for language teaching. This project was part of a university course on language learning and teaching in technology-rich environments. An important aspect of the course was to help the university students to explore and extend their understandings of language teaching and being language teachers. One of the student teams on the course had the opportunity of acting as language (pedagogy) experts while working with technology experts, negotiating directions for the application under development. Such a collaborative relationship together with the support of the course was expected to provide the participants with new perspectives, helping them to detach themselves from narrow conceptions of language pedagogy. Video materials were stored from different phases of the project. The design concepts and reflection papers produced by the students were also used in the analysis. The research drew on nexus analysis. The findings suggest that multidisciplinary collaboration can be fruitfully integrated into language teacher education to provide the students with experiences and perspectives for assuming an active role in technology development for language learning, and, additionally for seeing this type of cooperation as an essential element of their language teacher professionalism.

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