Prologue

The outsider’s challenge

From my standpoint in instructional design, it is delightful, though extremely hard to try to understand language learning in depth.

Experienced linguists and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) are certainly more qualified than me to debate questions in language learning/teaching with rigorous scientific accuracy.

In fact, even insiders may find this a hard task, since some fundamental questions remain open-ended in the field of second and foreign language learning and/or acquisition.

For example, in a long-standing debate known as the critical period hypothesis (Lightbown; Spada, 2006, p. 93), linguists have yet to reach consensus if learning languages is biologically linked to age or not.

Similarly, it may be difficult to agree on what makes someone a good language learner, on how foreign accents develop, or on why children may seem to learn languages so fast.

A burning question

In my lifelong involvement with language learning and brief experience as a language teacher, one question has always intrigued me: how might we make language learning more efficient?

Of course, this question is not new.

In fact, in a pursuit of better practices in language teaching, several methods have come and gone over the past hundred years, some in total “philosophical opposition to others” (Brown, 2000, p. 16)

But learning languages is often still perceived as being “harder than other subjects” and even “demotivating” (Ward, 2014), or causing “decreased motivation, frustration and anxiety” (Bernat; Gvozdenko, 2005).

In the realm of educational technology, I found that most language learning software are reproducing typical classroom approaches, where there could be more ambitious innovations (see: Landscape Audit).