Cultural Tasks for Digital Language Learning

Explaining how the cultural practices of a community can be used as the vehicle for learning its language, this book shows how two apps have been developed to deliver language learning while users are carrying out real-life cultural activities.

Many people are motivated to learn foreign languages by their interest in foreign cultures, cuisines and activities such as origami, Hallowe'en pumpkins or cooking a meal from the target culture. This book shows how these motivations can be integrated into the way we learn languages using the latest digital technology: the Linguacuisine and ENACT apps.

Written by experts in education, educational technology and applied linguistics, the book introduces the concept of the cultural task and provides a model, principles and procedures, enabling professionals in any area - including teachers and community workers - to adapt the apps to their own environment. Video tutorials on the accompanying website give users a hands-on introduction to using the apps and authoring their own cultural tasks in their own language for use by others. As such, the apps constitute a rich online repository of Open Educational Resources (OERs). This book is unique in revealing in detail how cultural tasks are enacted and brought to life in many different settings and showing the interplay between traditional and social semiotic conceptions of 'culture' in the enactment of cultural tasks. Another originality is its documenting how L2 learning during cultural tasks occurs, using both a process or social-interactional perspective and a product or cognitive-change perspective.

The chapters offer in-depth descriptions of how the apps were implemented in 5 different countries, with 9 different languages and cultures, and clear research evidence of the learning of cultural practices and languages through varied data sources including photographs of app use and cultural artefacts produced by users.