After carrying out text reading, it is possible to infer the...
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The announcement of pandemic-related lockdown measures in March 2020 in the UK led to a wide-ranging series of measures in education as a whole to deal with the sudden changes in the learning environment. These included top-down policy directives and centralised toolkits, but arguably in language education the most effective responses were often bottom-up community initiatives. Language education was well placed to deal with some of the challenges in responding to the rapid move to online teaching through historical work in areas such as computer-assisted language learning (CALL) (Levy) dating back to the 1960s and more recent variants such as mobile-assisted language learning (MALL). There has been undeniably community-driven work in the school sector in particular in recent years, with the use of the #MFLTwitterati hashtag in part driving debate around the use of technology in language education on Twitter long before COVID-19 struck, and the TiLT (Technology in Language Teaching) webinar series, which began soon afterwards in March 2020. During the COVID-19 crisis, in a drive to support language teachers in moving to online teaching, experts at the Open University developed a free toolkit that could be downloaded, used, adapted and modified by ML practitioners which indeed made a difference. Social media was often a useful platform to provide help with teaching online (Rosell-Aguilar). Other examples include interdisciplinary discussions, such as the AMLUK Symposium on Modern Languages, Area Studies and Linguistics in 2021, which provided examples of the relationship and possible interdisciplinary links between research and pedagogy in Modern Languages, Area Studies and Linguistics. This symposium assuredly opened up constructive discussions about which teaching methodologies and strategies could support the internationalisation and decolonisation of our discipline.
(Reflections on Post-Pandemic Pedagogical Trends in Language Education. In: Dec, 2023.)