Advancing Critical Call Across Institutions and Borders: Reimagining Possibilities for Languages, Literacies and Cultures

Since the Advances in CALL Research and Practice book series was launched in 2016, the field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has seen rapid pedagogical developments, as learners across all grade levels have benefited from online learning. During the recent COVID pandemic, abrupt and extensive migrations to emergency online teaching exposed social trauma, isolation, and inequities emerging with CALL. While teachers and learners with access to computer-based technologies will continue to use them extensively to support language learning moving forward, the need to recast CALL as a humanitarian project which amplifies diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) seems greater now than ever before.

This volume reimagines CALL as a vehicle for elevating the DEIA practices of language teachers and their students. It proposes that interinstitutional partnerships (i.e., those that involve knowledge and resource sharing across more than one institution) and transnational collaborations (i.e., those that include stakeholders located across national borders) are crucial for this purpose. It highlights a variety of CALL projects that have been collaboratively developed by stakeholders who are located at different institutions across the world, working with different languages. While the featured projects have varied aims–including curriculum development, virtual exchange, software development, and teacher professional development–collectively they advance our understanding of the ways that CALL and accessibility (DEIA) are purposefully and inextricably linked.

Dr. Emma R. Britton is an applied linguist whose research centers on applications of critical linguistic, posthumanist, sociocultural, and multimodal theories in a variety of digitally-mediated second and world language settings.

Dr. Angelika Kraemer is an applied linguist and the Director of the Language Resource Center at Cornell University.

Dr. Theresa Austin is a critical sociolinguist in education and a Professor of Language, Literacy & Culture at UMass Amherst.

Dr. Hengyi Liu recently completed Ph.D. studies in Language, Literacy and Culture at UMass Amherst.

Dr. Xinyue Zuo recently earned a Ph.D. From the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at UMass Amherst.