Cyber-learners and cyber-teachers: between autonomy and solitude

Cyber tools galore for language learning

Today, digital devices are multiplying to identify, model, categorize and overcome foreseeable difficulties in learning such languages/cultures, for a given aspect (phonetic, graphic, morpho-syntactic, communicative, pragmatic or cultural), simultaneously calling on a variety of codes (textual, iconic, visual, auditory) and media (sound recording, video game, comic strip, written text, hypertext).

The exchange of information using new technologies is becoming an essential social activity, a new way of living together on a global scale. The rise of the Internet has led to the emergence of paradigms that challenge the traditional theoretical and methodological frameworks of foreign language teaching. The field of the visible/readable (and even the audible) is expanding, raising a whole series of questions.

Are online courses and virtual forums capable of renewing language pedagogy? If so, should they be conceived as adjuncts to traditional teaching or, in the longer or shorter term, could they make the face-to-face course model disappear?


Will this new environment enable:

• the e-learner to emerge from anonymity and install flexible, reassuring interactions with a team of e-tutors as part of guided pathways?
• regulate the automation of reflexes and the prioritization of operations deemed essential according to needs, objectives and work rhythms?
• diversify the range of languages taught, and bring foreign-language distance learning to the most disadvantaged countries?

At a time of planetary exchange groups prompted by social networks, is it still necessary:

• to structure the field of knowledge beforehand?
• to guide language learning processes?
• to plan itineraries?
• to validate training courses?

What changes for the "cyber" teacher?

Is it still useful to provide strict grammatical, lexical, pragmatic, etc. calibration for our language lessons? Do we need to be in an explicit teaching situation for learning to take place? The teacher, the textbook and the language classroom are no longer the only points of contact with language and culture: today, millions of learners are in informal contact with foreign languages (particularly English on the Web), outside the classroom, thanks to a variety of authentic resources.

In this context, how does informal language use (there is no teaching as such) lead to language progression? Clearly, the informal learner, moving from one activity to another, doesn't follow a pre-established path or program; assessment is implicit.

Let's also consider video games, which demonstrate narrative and musical audacity, and which, through ever-increasing technical sophistication, stimulate the imagination and curiosity of players. Immersion in a virtual environment enables a wide range of social interactions. A space for socialization, the game stimulates exchanges of information characterized by alternating moments of relaxation and tension, connection and disconnection, orientation and loss of bearings (Piirainen-Marsh & Tainio (2014).

The machine modifies the environment in which it is installed, and also the behavior of the individuals who use it; the material conditions of communication also shape the form of messages. A striking example: in long-distance exchanges between non-native speakers and native speakers, we find that non-native speakers make particularly frequent use of emoticons. As non-verbal emotion markers, emoticons now seem to be part of compensation and avoidance strategies in situations of "verbal distress", enabling the learner to compensate for certain difficulties and shortcomings in mastering the foreign language (Vandergriff, 2014).


Multimodal "cyber" environment?

The multimodal environment, by bringing the learner into contact with a wide variety of media to read, see, hear and associate with each other, helps to improve his or her written and oral communication skills.

Also, this environment contributes to the development of critical thinking skills that the learner will need when leaving the classroom, and throughout his or her life. As a complex knowledge encompassing various modes of expression, multimodal literacy does not mean: adding images and sounds to written and illustrated texts, but rather: transmitting and apprehending multisensory experiences within a digital environment in a coordinated way (Nelson, 2012).


The development of multimodal environments for online exchanges is generating excitement among many language learning stakeholders. However, while a source of pleasure, learning a foreign language can also generate a feeling of insecurity. For example, there is a multiplicity of options for processing phonetic data, and it is indeed interesting to provide learners with a comparison tool (Voice Comparison Tool). However, we still need to explain to them how to correct their errors and what they need to do to improve their pronunciation. This leads us to question the necessary support component in the success of distance-integrated devices.


There are countless sites today that invite Internet users to interact with other people. The social and participative web massively calls on Internet users to interact and collaborate. What synergies can be envisaged between online learning practices and web practices involving information sharing and private, non-didactic exchanges via social networks?

Is there transferability between the formative and the social, between what is planned and guided in a pedagogical device and any other context of unmediated language exchange? Can we make operational skills acquired outside the educational and institutional field through more or less scattered "learning episodes" (Downes, 2010) that are nonetheless conducive to conversation and interaction?


What changes for the "cyber" learner?

Will today's learners be able to adapt to tomorrow's unprecedented discursive and interactional configurations? While it's vital to get them used to being confronted with tricky situations in which all their "resourcefulness" (savviness) will be called upon, such a requirement may involve going beyond the classic "accuracy"/"fluency" dichotomy.

The context in which we live is leading an increasingly numerous and heterogeneous public to attempt to train outside the school environment by seeking alternative paths. Autonomy, the beneficiary of the media revolution, is at the heart of the social challenge facing foreign language teaching. But is it up to the learner to create an environment conducive to language learning? While it is certainly necessary to develop learners' ability to reflect on their learning, it is not self-evident to require them to manage:

• to set themselves relevant objectives;
• to sort out the most appropriate learning strategies;
• to construct answers to their questioning themselves;
• to take into account all the affective factors determining their attitude and level of motivation and
• to assess themselves.

Autonomy, the ability to distance oneself and take charge in order to interact in different social spaces, in an unguided way, is a complex knowledge which, beyond the mastery of language elements, contains various organizational, informational, cognitive, psycho-affective and technical abilities.
Is the freedom to navigate as one pleases synonymous with better understanding / production of content? Numerous "100% digital" methods are designed for a self-learning experience. They offer a range of functionalities (more or less communicative and interactive): dialogues, grammar and civilization notes, lexicons, revision and reuse exercises, the possibility of recording oneself and comparing one's accent with the correct pronunciation. Nevertheless, is it possible to provide learners with both a structured framework for action, enabling them to identify their shortcomings and to take charge of their own learning, and all this in a secure environment?


Every teacher knows that no matter how well we program and individualize learning by pre-defining continuums and pre-selecting paths according to learners' objectives and profiles, empowerment won't happen with a wave of a magic wand. Being autonomous doesn't mean: building your path alone, training yourself alone, assessing yourself alone and motivating yourself alone. Autonomy means more than that: being aware of one's limits, knowing how to identify one's deficits (in understanding the discourse of native speakers, in producing discourse comprehensible to native speakers, etc.) and gradually learning to make effective use of external resources of various kinds.

It's not because there are several of you in a classroom that you're the beneficiary of a collaborative project, and it's not because you're there alone that you're autonomous. Empowerment, the transition from the "controlled" phase to the "automatic" phase, cannot be decreed.


Indispensable for information retrieval, the Web appears, on the surface, to be an ideal tool for providing one-stop, record-breaking access to a multitude of data that will enthrall teachers and learners alike. But to what extent does language teaching benefit from this saturation of words and images? The success of search engines has already revolutionized the way we get our hands on information. But how do we deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much information of varying status? What place should be given, in the teaching of foreign languages, to the search for and exploitation of raw data representative of linguistic reality?


How can we build a "cyber" pedagogy?

In the pedagogical process, it's no longer just a matter of transferring knowledge (abundantly online), but of working on "access routes to knowledge", bringing critical distance to bear on the tool that conveys it, paying attention to the filtering process. Sherzer & Urban (1986: 1-2) note, with regard to ethnographic descriptions: "we are rarely informed about the structure of the discourse through which knowledge is produced, conceived, transmitted and acquired"; so they suggest that we focus research on the glass itself: "discourse is invisible, a glass through which ethnographer comes to perceive the reality of social relations ..."

The dizzying development of virtual environments offers varied language samples, and clearly the machine reinforces exposure to foreign language. However, are we moving towards "real life" by co-acting and co-constructing at a distance? On the basis of a pedagogical device offering learners the chance to participate in social interaction while remaining in their usual school environment, can we consider that the classroom is now populated by social actors?

The psycho-affective dimension is essential to the implementation of any new pedagogical device. Given that learning is both an individual and a collective process, collaborative activity can undoubtedly become a source of anxiety for some. Let's not forget the phrase "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" from a famous cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in 1993. Alluding to anonymity, the image depicts a dog in front of a computer who utters this phrase while turning to another dog sitting on the floor.

The computer is a strange affair of encounter and solitude. We are "alone and together", and the fragility of human relationships requires a constant effort to maintain contact between interlocutors engaged in an exchange (since communication doesn't always have a purpose other than communication itself). In our electronic exchanges, do we need to say more than the bare essentials? Do the hollow moments of politeness become unnecessary? Certainly not, in the eyes of Selinger (2013), who denounces the gradual transformation of 'digital natives' into 'etiquette sociopaths': "But while living according to the gospel of technological efficiency and frictionless sharing is fine as a Silicon Valley innovation ethos, it makes for a downright depressing social ethic." (But while living according to the gospel of technological efficiency and frictionless sharing is fine as a Silicon Valley innovation ethos, it makes for a downright depressing social ethic."

Each methodological and technological "revolution" imposes new skills on the teacher. Any new mode of communication is bound to create new ways of exchanging and creating information. The adoption of any new practice corresponds to a change in pedagogical paradigm and identity.

Hence a final question that deserves further consideration: what is the nature of the relationship between methodological thinking and the pedagogical environment? Should we not admit here that, quite often, there are significant discontinuities between the space of discourse produced by digital humanities researchers and what is actualized in classroom realities, including at a university level?



Thomas Szende, University Professor (Hungarian & applied linguistics). Director of Plidam, Inalco.



Bibliographic elements

Downes, S. (2010). "New Technology Supporting Informal Learning." Journal of Emerging Technology in Web Intelligence, vol. 2, no. 1.

Nelson, M.E. (2012), "Multimodality and Literacy", Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Wiley-Blackwell [Online]

Piirainen-Marsh, A. and Tainio, L. (2014), Asymmetries of Knowledge and Epistemic Change in Social Gaming Interaction. The Modern Language Journal, 98: 1022-1038.

Selinger, E. (2013), "How We're Turning Digital Natives Into Etiquette Sociopaths", 03.26.13, www.wired.com

Sherzer, J. & Urban, G. (Eds.) (1986), Native South American Discourse, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Vandergriff, I. (2014), A Pragmatic Investigation of Emoticon Use in Nonnative /Native Speaker Text Chat, Language@Internet, Volume 11. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2014/vandergriff/