Sinking or swimming with post-Covid CALL? Enhancing teaching practices and education programmes to foster agentive, digitally literate language learners

After many long years of advocating for the integration of CALL into Higher Education and proselytising our neo-Luddite colleagues along the way, the CALL community now faces the almost counter-intuitive challenge of a forced on-line setting due to the world health crisis that started in March 2020. Meaningful technology integration occurs when student learning processes, the curriculum, the learning context and technology affordances are considered in tandem (Harris & Hoffer, 2011). Taking this as a context for our study, we explored how this new (forced) educational setting has impacted our learners in terms of becoming more self-directed in using CALL packages, apps, OERs or any type of technology-based language learning resource (Authors, Forthcoming). In our higher education context, language teachers have perhaps taken an overly prescriptive approach towards their teaching practices, based on the belief that students who leave second-level education are poorly equipped to learn autonomously. In this presentation we will show evidence that  students were capable of agentive learning when the need to do so was thrust upon them, and we will argue that language students are more capable than previously thought, of effectively managing their own learning at the same time that they develop their critical digital literacies (CDL) (Fuchs et al., 2012). This carries clear implications for teacher practices and teacher education programmes.
  The method employed to conduct this research is a mixed-method where qualitative and quantitative data emerges respectively from students’ (n=68) personal blogs, a final essay and a group interview (n=10) allowing us to explore further students’ perceptions, experiences and awareness on the development of their (critical) digital literacies as the means for becoming more independent, self-directed and autonomous learners. Our current outcomes and implications reveal how timely and relevant it was for our students to realise and acknowledge the importance of developing their own CDL as language learners and indeed, as digital citizens. An agentive literacy (Authors, 2020) appears to be present in the learning process of most of the participants in this study; such an agency is instigated by self-awareness, self-motivation and ultimately, by becoming a self-directed learner. Our results show students perceived that technology enhanced their language learning, and that their autonomous technology-assisted learning outside the classroom was an extension of what they started discovering in the classroom and then applied beyond formal class settings. Thus, this presentation will argue that teacher education programmes, and by extension, university language programmes should better facilitate and guide students in their development as agentive, autonomous learners. This curricular change will involve  broadening perceptions of what constitutes language-learning resources and practices not only among students but also among teachers, as teachers are the key to the process of technology integration, influenced by internal and external factors that inhibit or motivate their use of technology. Even in a post-Covid world, it is likely that online elements of teaching and learning will remain more common than before, understanding how and why learners develop and employ autonomous, agentive learning capabilities has become more important than ever. The method employed to conduct this research is a mixed-method where qualitative and quantitative data emerges respectively from students’ (n=68) personal blogs, a final essay and a group interview (n=10) allowing us to explore further students’ perceptions, experiences and awareness on the development of their (critical) digital literacies as the means for becoming more independent, self-directed and autonomous learners. Our current outcomes and implications reveal how timely and relevant it was for our students to realise and acknowledge the importance of developing their own CDL as language learners and indeed, as digital citizens. An agentive literacy (Authors, 2020) appears to be present in the learning process of most of the participants in this study; such an agency is instigated by self-awareness, self-motivation and ultimately, by becoming a self-directed learner. Our results show students perceived that technology enhanced their language learning, and that their autonomous technology-assisted learning outside the classroom was an extension of what they started discovering in the classroom and then applied beyond formal class settings. Thus, this presentation will argue that teacher education programmes, and by extension, university language programmes should better facilitate and guide students in their development as agentive, autonomous learners. This curricular change will involve broadening perceptions of what constitutes language-learning resources and practices not only among students but also among teachers, as teachers are the key to the process of technology integration, influenced by internal and external factors that inhibit or motivate their use of technology. Even in a post-Covid world, it is likely that online elements of teaching and learning will remain more common than before, understanding how and why learners develop and employ autonomous, agentive learning capabilities has become more important than ever.