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As part of a larger effort to support Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) instruction in the United States, the LCTL Partnership at Michigan State University (MSU) and the LCTL Collaborative Partners initiative at the University of Chicago (UC) are supporting online LCTL courses to be offered to students across multiple institutions. As the initiatives were underway, it became clear that LCTL teachers’ familiarity with online teaching ranged widely. This is not surprising, especially considering that many LCTL teachers have never participated in any kind of online learning experience – let alone taught online. This paper reports on the first phase of a collaborative project that aims to identify and define key competencies for Online Language Teaching (OLT) and conceptualize a set of OLT readiness can-do statements. In a next phase, this framework will be used to build an assessment that gauges teachers’ readiness to teach language courses online and provide these teachers with formative feedback.

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This study presents an innovative approach to developing interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) by training students to engage in online participatory cultures and analyzing their participation through the lens of communities of practice. Participants were university-level English language learners studying in the United States who were trained on the basic layout and practices of a social news and discussion site (Reddit), then assigned weekly postings within forums based on their individual interests. Social media engagement metrics (upvotes and responses) were used to measure and observe the quantity and quality of online interaction, and post-task questionnaires and follow-up interviews investigated learner perceptions about the language and cyberpragmatics in the online communities they encountered. Quantitative results show that participants struggled to achieve high levels of interaction with other users, but qualitative results indicate a wide range of potential benefits for ILP exploration and development. The findings and implications of this study contribute towards best practices in developing strategies for ILP in online spaces and cyberpragmatic awareness among language learners, enabling them to reach higher levels of participation in online communities.

This chapter demonstrates a model for technology integration in learner-centered classrooms for educators, administrators, and policy makers. In this model, students are trained on how to use a technological tool but then given freedom to choose how much and in what specific content area they use the tool. Three key aspects of learner-centered curriculum design are supported by this model: 1) delivering scaffolding strategies to help students become active and autonomous learners; 2) giving learners a role in shaping the curriculum, and 3) recognizing each learner's diverse, unique background and learning style (American Psychological Association, 1997). The application of the model described here is rather narrow--training English as a Second Language (ESL) students to use online geographical tools (e.g., Google Earth) – but it can be adapted to suit a wide range of technological tools, subjects, and contexts.