Eurocall

Providing students with contemporary, up-to-date listening experiences in L2 is an ongoing challenge for language educators. Indeed, much commercially available material is dated or presents language in an idealised and decontextualised way. Audiostreaming provides a wealth of resources which may go some way towards resolving these issues. Contemporary teaching and learning materials on an extremely wide range of topics are easily downloaded from national radio station websites and are accessible via systems such as podcasting. This paper discusses one attempt at integrating these resources into tertiary language courses and demonstrates how these can be easily and efficiently integrated into meaningful online learning tasks. In addition, we discuss the complex issue of copyright and online materials in Australia, UK (Europe) and the US.

With this research and design paper, we are proposing that Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) publications give increasing access to high quality online educational and research content for the development of powerful domain-specific language collections that can be further enhanced linguistically with the Flexible Language Acquisition System (FLAX, http://flax. nzdl.org). FLAX uses the Greenstone digital library system, which is a widely used open-source software that enables end users to build collections of documents and metadata directly onto the Web (Witten, Bainbridge, & Nichols, 2010). FLAX offers a powerful suite of interactive text-mining tools, using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence designs, to enable novice collections builders to link selected language content to large pre-processed linguistic databases. An open methodology trialed at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the OER Research Hub at the UK Open University demonstrates how applying open corpus-based designs and technologies can enhance open educational practices among language teachers and subject academics for the preparation and delivery of courses in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP).

In the world that we live in now, exclusion is becoming legally permissible, and technology has the power to resist by making bridges and surpassing the offline borders in the online, borderless environment. In this presentation, I will share my visa story and the details of my UK visa denials which eventually banned me from attending EUROCALL2017. Despite being denied, the EUROCALL team helped me overcome the political barriers and be part of EUROCALL2017 with the help of technology. I will discuss how I was provided with opportunities for remote participation especially through Virtually Connecting, which is an open connected learning community that aims to facilitate virtual participation in academic conferences for those who cannot be physically present at conferences. I will also talk about other Open Educational Practices occurred at EUROCALL2017, for example, tweeting and live broadcasting. I will further explain the differences I found between attending a conference onsite and online. Moreover, I will introduce the EUROCALL "Access and Inclusion" working group and the efforts that the committee is making to create more inclusive, diverse, and open educational opportunities. Finally, I would like to speak briefly about my PhD research project, titled Osaka University Global English Online (OUGEO), which I planned to present on at EUROCALL2017.

The present paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A Second Step in Second Life), a project funded by Umeå University. One of the aims of the project is to make use of the affordances offered by Second Life in order to raise sociolinguistic language awareness among teacher trainees and other students studying courses in sociolinguistics. Several experiments were conducted where creative use of the avatar in combination with so-called "voice-morphing" (a tool which allows the voice of the speaker to be distorted so that a male speaker can sound more feminine and vice versa) allowed students to enter the virtual world incognito in order to "experience" a different linguistic identity. Activities were conducted in cross-cultural settings involving students from Sweden and Chile. The paper presents a model for how language awareness issues can be internalised through first-hand experience in virtual worlds.

The challenge of adopting virtual education to respond the needs of a global knowledge society in the 21st century requires the existence and implementation of systematic instructional models that fulfill the students’ learning needs and develop autonomous and collaborative academic practices mediated by Information and Communication Technologies. In response to the requirements for innovation and improvement in higher education programs, the author’s department created this project to examine methodologies for the implementation of open, flexible, learner-centered online courses that allow students in language teaching programs to use technology as a means to expand life-long learning opportunities. This article presents results from the systematic construction and implementation of an online course grounded in a fusion of principles and features from Salmon´s (2000) and Keller´s (1987) instructional design theories, as well as Constructivist theory. This course design experience has provided the basis for the creation of virtual courses in the author’s university over the last two years.