The 5th Pedagogy and Practice in Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (July 1st to 3rd, 2022)

Authors: Hongliang Ma¹, Liwei Hsu^2*

I. Overview

The expeditious development and progress of technologies have made the use of various kinds of technologies in educational praxis the norm and language education is no exception. Particularly when the COVID-19 has changed our lifestyles drastically and such an unprecedented change also facilitates the applications of technologies in teachers’ pedagogy and practice. More empirical evidence as well as practical examples on technology-enhanced language learning are in great need and hence call for further explorations. Taiwan Pedagogy and Practice in Technology-Enhanced Language Learning Association (PPTELL Association) was founded in July 2020 with Prof. Yu-Ju Lan as the first Chairman and Prof. Meei-Ling Liaw as the first Vice-Chairman. With the aim to promote the collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the fields of Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), PPTELL is keen to make contributions to advance our current knowledge on the role technologies play in language education.

II. Previous PPTELL Conferences

In past years, four PPTELL conferences have already been held even before the Association was founded. The National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) hosted the first and the second PPTELL Conference in 2018 and 2019 on its Heping campus and Linkou campus respectively. In the year of 2020, PPTELL conference was jointly hosted by the NTNU and the University of North Texas (UNT), U.S.A. Particular gratitude must go to the financial support of the Ministry of Science and Technology as well as the Office of Research and Development of the NTNU as these conferences were held successfully and fruitfully. The global situation of COVID-19 pandemic was still devastating in 2021, which made PPTELL 2021 be held online again. Even so, more attendees and participants joined the conference to share their recent research in the concurrent sessions and also socialized on the virtual platform of Second Life during break time.

The themes of each PPTELL conference focus mainly on understanding the issues of striving for the better implementation of TELL, including what to do and how to do it; equally important, the underlying reasons why it should be done. Since 2018, the PPTELL conferences have convened researchers and the front-line practitioners to have thorough discussions from the vantage points of theory as well as practice on the potentials of integrating language learning and advanced technologies for providing language learners with better learning outcomes. Various appealing yet important topics have been covered in the past PPTELL conferences, including smart learning environments, AI, robotic technology, augmented/virtual reality, educational analytics/big data, mobile computing, and educational game-based learning. It is worth noting that PPTELL 2020 and 2021 conferences were held amid the COVID-19 pandemic and hence they both were conducted solely online. With the joint efforts of many researchers and scholars, the aforementioned two PPTELLs were a breakthrough when international travel was still unrealistic. These two online conferences received remarkable success and so will be the following PPTELL 2022, which will take place online again. The details are listed in the following section.

III. PPTELL 2022