The multiple contexts of online language teaching

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often have their origin in out-of-school contexts and not in institutional discourse and ... SUBJECT: YoYo!. . . ChRiS10nE in tha House!.; ... Address for correspondence: Andreas Lund, InterMedia, University of Oslo, Postboks 1161,. Blindern 0318 ..... hand and prone to private comments, jokes and snide remarks on the other.
Language Teaching Research 10,2 (2006); pp. 181–204

The multiple contexts of online language teaching Andreas Lund

InterMedia, University of Oslo

The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss some communicative opportunities currently emerging in networked classrooms and their implications for didactics. In particular, I examine multiple contexts that appear and how they give rise to diverse practices. However, such practices often have their origin in out-of-school contexts and not in institutional discourse and curricula. Consequently, we need to understand how these practices can be explored and exploited in educational contexts. Otherwise, schools risk losing out on important cultural change and may fail to prepare learners for emergent communicative opportunities and requirements. In this paper, which is based on a longitudinal study of Norwegian teachers of English practising in technology-rich environments, I discuss the implications of teaching in and across multiple contexts that emerge in technology-rich environments. Findings indicate that we need to develop our notion of didactics so that it supports teachers working across multiple contexts. As such, didactics takes on the characteristics of a boundary object that mediates learning in and across different social worlds.

I Introduction FROM: Christine (9/13/99 1:53PM) SUBJECT: YoYo!. . . ChRiS10nE in tha House!.;) FROM: Heidi (9/13/99 1:57PM)

SUBJECT: hey everybody!! I’m in too! really cool yea?? hehe! see yah! FROM: Sarah (9/13/99 1:57PM)

SUBJECT: Aloha!! Hey Hey Hey!I’m in!!!!!;c). . .. . . Yo ganxhstas!!wazzup?? -sarah-

Address for correspondence: Andreas Lund, InterMedia, University of Oslo, Postboks 1161, Blindern 0318, Oslo, Norway; e-mail: [email protected] © 2006 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd

10.1191/1362168806lr191oa

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The above short exchange, taken from a networked environment, illustrates the phenomenon that forms the backdrop for this paper: languages, language practices and language environments in transformation. In the present case, the illustration is taken from a Norwegian classroom of 17-year-old learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The learners were asked to log into the school’s Learning Management System (LMS) and write a short message to state their online presence. The year was 1999. Today, we know that exchanges such as the one above reflect new practices common in, but not restricted to, online communication. How can we understand this phenomenon? What may its impact be on the foreign language classroom? What are the implications for teaching and teachers? These questions are pursued in the following pages. In particular, I examine practices where a teacher tries to negotiate the boundaries between different contexts for language learning and different discourses. The conceptual focus is on the phenomenon as it manifests itself in the EFL classroom, but I believe there is relevance for language teaching in general. I approach the phenomenon from a sociocultural perspective (e.g. Vygotsky, 1978; 1986; Wells, 1999; Wertsch, 1998), which entails a view of learning as participating in social practices and discourses, mediated by cultural tools. Actions add up to social practices through which people respond to, interpret, and influence affordances and constraints in contexts they engage in. However, people participate in and move between different contexts; the school as a cultural-historical institution, the circle of friends who share an interest, the emergent practices in online environments. Each context is constituted by a distinct discourse, but in everyday lives we cross the boundaries between them by making connections across contexts. Thus, we experience the challenges of participating in and making sense of different practices, linguistic and social, i.e. the challenge of polycontextuality (Engeström et al., 1995; Leander, 2002). Historically, teaching has mainly served the institutional context of schools and curricula. I argue that we need to reconsider this practice as teaching (and learning) increasingly takes place in and across multiple contexts. In such a perspective, the concept of boundary objects (Jahreie and Ludvigsen, 2004; Konkola et al., 2004; Star and Griesemer, 1989; Wenger, 1998) seems to have much explanatory power. A boundary object can serve to negotiate the route from one context to another and thus allow for a richer learning experience, Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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more attuned to currently emerging practices – practices that constitute participation in twenty-first-century language communities (BruttGriffler, 2004; Hawkins, 2004). However, before I pursue this theoretical angle, the multiple contexts of EFL need to be mapped in order to see what teachers are up against and why boundary objects are needed. II The phenomenon: ‘New Englishes’ Recent research estimates that two billion people will start learning English within a decade and that by 2015 three billion people – half the world’s population – will speak English (Burleigh, 2004). Apart from the sheer impact of the numbers, the cultural heterogeneity and geographical distribution of speakers exercise an influence on English such that the language can be viewed as an international resource that consists of a plethora of variants, hybrids and ‘New Englishes’ (Brutt-Griffler, 2004; Crystal, 2001). An important consequence is that non-native English speakers’ communication with other non-natives is the typical context for building knowledge and sharing meanings within as well as across cultures (Nuffield Languages Inquiry, 2000). Thus, English is found in different communities, at different levels of the community, in many variants and far removed from the notion of a national language as a girder in the nationalist state (Kalantzis and Cope, 2000). The language emerges as a truly polycontextual resource, embedded in and appropriated by diverse cultures. There may still be a written standard of English serving global communication but, increasingly, variants of English that draw on diverse linguistic and (sub-)cultural features are making themselves felt. This trend intensifies under the impact of networked technologies. With more than 550 billion documents on the web (Lyman and Varian, 2003), several hundred thousand discussion forums, e-mail as the dominating one-to-one and one-to-many communication form, and community-oriented weblogs and wikis on the rise, English is suddenly in an even more exceptional position than the one described above. The language totally dominates the many online contexts that emerge. For example, as of September 2004, native speakers of English accounted for 35.2% of the total world online population of 801.4 million people (Global Reach, 2004). As of July 2000, 68.4% of all web pages were in English, with Japanese as number two at 5.9%, followed Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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by German (5.8%) (Vilaweb, 2000). The difference between English and the rest underlines the unique position of this language in online contexts. Taken together global English and online English point to the circumstances in which English is acquired in school as well as in powerful outof-school contexts. Out-of-school-contexts are rich in non-standardized variants that may be regarded as innovative and functional outside the classroom but may be seen as challenging or even detrimental in a curricular context. Such variants may not be easily compatible with the traditional perspective on language learning in the educational system. When languages go online we see a tension between centripetal (standardization) as well as centrifugal (fragmentation, hybridization) forces. Still, ‘–this latter-day Babel manages to work’ (Crystal, 2001: 56). Crystal sees communication as the primary goal and the many linguistic variants as new opportunities for communication, not as ‘inferior’ variants that are lacking in formal aspects. He points to inventive spelling and vocabulary, punctuation and discursive markers as well as emerging genres such as chat and virtual worlds. Hård af Segerstad (2002) finds that computer-mediated communication represents an extension of interactional opportunities and that the stylistic variants Crystal points to are not in any way depleted or reduced forms of language, but rather creative and context sensitive variants that add to existing practices. Other researchers have also pointed to this connection between expanded contexts and transformed language practices (Kern et al., 2004; Lund, 2001; 2003; 2004a; Thorne, 2002; Warschauer, 1999; 2000b; 2002). How will such polycontexuality be met by teachers and learners of English? ‘Some teachers . . . allow the new forms into their teaching; others rule them out’ (Crystal, 1998: 135). Kachru and Nelson (2001: 22) conclude on a more normative note: ‘–it is most important in teacher training to create teacher awareness of the status and functions of Englishes in the world today and in the future’. These hybrids and variants are closely linked to the contexts speakers are part of, would like to be associated with, or obtain a footing in. Such a situation requires that teaching needs to address not only a standardized or institutionalized discourse in EFL but the many social languages that reside within this discourse (Gee, 2004). However, where L1 speakers may be aware of and deliberately play with crossing boundaries between standard and non-standard variants, Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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EFL speakers may appear to do the same just by adopting deviant usage (Crystal, 2001: 236–37). Thus, naïve and non-reflective imitation can be mistaken for linguistic repertoire and flamboyance. This represents a dilemma for educators. The introductory excerpts may illustrate a somewhat extreme case of chat-like usage, while in other classroom practices the influx may be more subtle. For teachers it becomes increasingly important to understand such practices so that they can guide learners across contexts, including the school standard that historically has proved to be the gateway to the English-speaking community, and to point out how stylistic features are highly contextual. The situation cannot be ‘solved’ by choosing one (standardized) variant, but must be managed by being context-sensitive in the didactic approach. I have used the emergence of ‘New Englishes’ to draw attention to this aspect while Gee (2000: 63) argues that, ‘All language is meaningful only in and through the contexts in which it is used.’ It is these contexts that must become an integrated part of teaching that aims to educate people for adapting to, participating in, and ultimately improving the communities they belong to. This does not amount to a mere set of techniques or methods for teaching in or across multiple contexts. It means connecting teaching to a perspective on (language) learning that makes it possible to approach stylistic features as contextual resources. ‘New Englishes’ including online variants can only be understood by navigating the multiple contexts in which they manifest themselves. Such navigation involves crossing boundaries between language practices and for learners this requires critical and informed guidance. In the next section, I will therefore briefly introduce a theoretical perspective and some concepts that, I argue, can contribute to this. III Theoretical perspective In a sociocultural perspective, the primary focus is not so much on the relationship between the learner and the language but on the relationship between the learner(s) and the world as it is represented by and acted upon through language (Bakhtin, 1979; Lantolf, 2000; Mercer, 2000; Miller, 2004; Wells, 1999). Cognition is seen as originating in social interaction and not in the decontextualized mind. There is a change in perspective from individual language acquisition to social language acquisition through participating in speech communities (Brutt-Griffler, Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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2004; van Lier, 2000; Watson-Gegeo, 2004). Consequently, there is also a shift in the unit of analysis from the individual speaker to the speech community. This is a useful perspective when we approach emergent educational practices across cultures and contexts – offline and online – since such practices develop collaboratively as well as collectively, as macro-acquisition (Brutt-Griffler, 2004: 138). It is the result of people interacting with each other, with their contexts, and with available artifacts in order to build and be socialized into language communities, construct knowledge and create meaning. Within this broader sociocultural perspective the present study seeks to frame such processes in terms of activity theory (Engeström, 1999) and a set of interrelated constructs: activity systems, polycontextuality and boundary objects. At the heart of activity theory is the transformation of existing environments and activity systems, through human interaction and use of cultural tools. An activity system integrates the subject (e.g. learner/s or teacher/s), the object (e.g. learning or teaching English) and the tools or artifacts (chalk, computers) as a unified whole. It also integrates the conditions under which this happens: rules and regulations (curricula), the community (a class), the people involved and how they divide the work between them. The outcome of the activities might be physical, an essay for example, or cognitive, such as increased ability to participate in a certain practice. Activities are goal directed; for example passing an exam, preparing for a task, or taking part in a discourse community. However, the EFL activity system constituted by schooling is often different from EFL activity systems outside school. Online environments, for instance, afford new resources and new opportunities for communication. The object (learning EFL) is reconceptualized as learners become exposed to these resources and opportunities and empowered to explore and exploit them. With more semiotic resources available (emerging genres, multimodality, creative spelling), learners can do this in very different ways. As pointed out in the Introduction, we do not belong to one system only. We act in several and we move between them: school, workplace, local communities, online and offline. Increasingly, such polycontextuality is brought into schools as networked ICTs continue to infuse classroom practices. The result is that the activities that constitute learning and teaching EFL depend on constantly shifting relations between agents, contexts and artifacts. Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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Boundary objects can be used as analytic constructs that help us see and examine these shifting relations. Such objects can be seen as common points of reference across different settings: they serve to bring different communities together. The concept of boundary objects was developed by Star and Griesemer (1989) to reconcile differences in how objects and methods were perceived across different scientific and social worlds. Such diversity in perception cannot be left to ad hoc interpretations but must be aligned to maintain a common identity across contexts: These objects may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognisable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393)

In the present study, agents in different social worlds share the goal of participating in English speaking discourses. But English may have a different meaning and may be perceived differently according to the context in which it is encountered. We might say that becoming proficient in English today means to participate in and move between several activity systems, to manage multiple memberships and navigate in more than one world. For analytic purposes, I make a deliberate simplification of the many contexts so that we can focus on school contexts and out-of-school contexts in terms of activity systems. The former is institutional, fairly stable and sustained by curricula, exams and textbooks. The latter is locally situated, dynamic and sustained by the polyphony of voices mediated by new social and technological opportunities for participation. There are tensions and even contradictions between these two activity systems, but at the same time they reciprocally constitute a boundary zone for English – or Englishes. Knowledge and skills are not just transferred across this zone. Rather, it is the persons that move and draw on new contextual resources to (re-)construct their relations to the new situation. In the case of EFL, this can be seen in how school and out-of-school contexts demand different types of communicative competence. Learners and teachers need to negotiate the boundary zone between the two activity systems and make connections between them (Jahreie and Ludvigsen, 2004; Konkola et al., 2004). This amounts to expanding a linguistic and communicative repertoire by drawing on new Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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opportunities at the interface of the two systems. Such development does not happen automatically, however: it must be supported by boundary zone teaching to develop and sustain polycontextual and horizontal expertise. Consequently, there is a need to ‘didacticize’ zones that currently are beyond the socio-historically co-located classroom practices. In the following section, I present situations from EFL classrooms where communicative activities are found at the interface of activity systems: the co-localized classroom and the distributed online environment, the institutional dimensions and those that reflect learners’ lifeworlds. As learners and teachers populate and traverse this polycontextual space, their practices are transformed and expanded. We see more available configurations of agents, artifacts and contexts. In short, we see EFL didactics (see Section V below) emerging as a potential boundary object. IV Emerging practices 1 Data and methods In 1999 and 2000, 423 Norwegian teachers of EFL in upper secondary schools participated in an online in-service course combining ICT literacy and pedagogical approaches to technology rich learning environments. After the course, 208 teachers responded to a questionnaire mapping their beliefs about and attitudes to ICT. Of relevance to the present article is the finding that 75% of the respondents considered co-located and online environments to be complementary contexts (Lund, 2004a). Other researchers have also argued for the complementarity of offline and online environments (Leander and Johnson, 2002; Warschauer, 2000a). What emerges is a situation where two spatial and temporal dimensions converge: the interface between the co-located and the distributed environments opens up new opportunities for learners and teachers. Following the survey, three teachers were selected for analysis of practices over a period of 18 months. Communicative activities among learners and teachers in networked environments were analysed. This was done using empirical data from online log files as well as audiotaped classroom activities covering approximately 30 sessions of 45 minutes. Discourse analysis, focusing on communication as social as well as individual acts (Van Dijk, 1997), was used to capture contextual shifts more than turn-taking or linguistic features. Such shifts were Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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examined as they manifested themselves in episodes and activities that centre on particular purposes or objectives (Lund, 2004a). The three teachers referred to above made extensive use of the communicative opportunities found in LMSs, e-mail exchanges and chat forums. Due to the restricted format of an article only one of these teachers will function as a point of reference. Teacher Tom was selected since he arranged a series of online discussions relevant to targets in the curriculum. These discussions utilized the networked environment as an extension of the co-located setting and with potentially richer opportunities for communication and the language practices that constitute the phenomenon under examination. Thus, Tom may not be considered typical of the average teacher or as an example of ‘best practice’, but rather as an embodiment of emerging practices, ‘what may be’ (Schofield, 1993: 213), adding a future aspect to the study. 2 Emerging practices between multiple contexts Tom’s class consisted mostly of 17-year-old learners in the foundation course of the Norwegian Upper Secondary School. English as a school subject is allotted five lessons per week, which Tom grouped into one double and one triple session. During the triple session, the class had access to two computer labs with a total of 30 networked computers, an LMS and assorted software. On 6 March 2001, Relationships was the topic of the day. The class had in the previous session read a short story on this topic. This text was followed up in a variety of ways: learners handed in a short essay on what they thought was important in relationships, and Tom developed a storyboard sequence centring on a moral dilemma reminiscent of the theme of the story. This was followed by a co-located plenary discussion. At every stage, Tom sought to engage learners in interaction, in eliciting not just words but articulated thought and reasoning. This proved to be a difficult task in a class that was somewhat reticent on the one hand and prone to private comments, jokes and snide remarks on the other. The co-located activities are in many ways examples of how the teacher tries to build productive interactions that serve goals in the curriculum (Rasmussen, 2005). However, they also show how the teacher balances between the school setting with its institutional and curricular practice on the one hand and the learners’ lifeworlds on Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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the other with their often rude remarks, private hints and references. The co-located activities rarely produced more than single utterances from the learners, and one half of the class did not engage in them. Although the institutional school context with its curricular script dominated, it did not seem to afford learner participation beyond rudimentary contributions. a Contextual shifts and horizontal moves: In the subsequent triple session the online environment was introduced. The previous day Tom had posted a note in a discussion forum on the LMS: FROM: Tom (03/05/01 6:27 AM GMT -06:00) SUBJECT: Relationships It is not always easy to stay friends. Sometimes we do or say things to each other that are hurting or disrespectful. The closer we get, the more we can hurt each other, and the more we know about each other the more it hurts. How do we behave and treat each other to make a relationship last?

This message triggered a series of responses. The logs show that many who were reticent or off-task during the face-to-face plenary sessions gained a voice online. One learner (immigrant background) who did not volunteer one single utterance throughout the face-to-face activities writes: FROM: Mei Li (03/06/01 3:30 AM GMT -06:00) SUBJECT: yeah is all about respect.u must respect eachother and be honest,so u can trust eachother.a realationships can’t work when is doubt in the picture.u need to sit down and take a seriuos talk when u have something on ur mind.

The introductory ‘yeah’ shows how Mei Li immediately picks up on Tom’s line of thinking. However, her voice carries out-of-school features (‘yeah’) and her social language deviates from a standard but her entry carries substance as well as coherence. In conceptual terms such as respect, honesty and trust, she addresses the topic of relationships. Mei Li’s lifeworld can be tapped for experience in this semi-virtual environment, and this process is mediated and afforded by the ‘faceless’ and less confronting dimensions of the online classroom. It is not merely a response to the teacher: she has also elaborated a point (respect), thus contributing to the discussion. In Mei Li’s case this appears to be possible by moving horizontally from offline to online modes, from school context to lifeworld – linguistically as well as in the approach to the Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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topic. But this potentially teachable moment remains unresolved. There is no online follow-up from the teacher or peers and the technology can only sort the posting and make it persistent, not engage the learner in further interaction. Thus, this brief example serves to illustrate polycontextual affordance as well as a missed opportunity for the teacher to ‘didacticize’ it. Another reticent pupil makes several postings, but sticks to his ironic style and the snide remark he cultivated in the ‘traditional’ sessions. The following posting addresses previous postings from classmates: FROM: espen (03/06/01 3:31 AM GMT -06:00) SUBJECT: Eirik . . .. I don’t think you’ll get a better way by using the Harald/Per (brown nosing) method. but you can try

While Mei Li addresses the teacher, Espen addresses a classmate and refers to two others. The many-to-many mode afforded by the LMS extends the communicative space, and this is exploited by several of the learners. Espen’s use of the possibly objectionable term brown nosing causes extreme interest with other classmates rushing over to his place in order to find out the meaning of the term. During this and other discussions nearly all learners seem to favour experimenting with, in particular, spelling and vocabulary as they post messages to the conferences. The LMS obviously represents a communicative opportunity but one that is left to the learners to pursue from their lifeworld perspective. The teacher is not active online after the initial posting and, thus, an important boundary object to translate between learners’ social worlds and the institutional context is missing. Another aspect of computer-mediated communication is seen in the next excerpt. Harald addresses his teacher in a personal and phatic mode, obviously drawing on personal experience: it is his lifeworld that speaks to the teacher and to his classmates. At the same time, he incorporates phrases from Tom in his response, thereby weaving a fabric of intertextuality and reciprocality: FROM: Harald (03/06/01 3:41 AM GMT -06:00) SUBJECT: Re: How to make it(friendship) last. . . Tom, why are you looking so pessimistic about this issue??? The more you know the more it hurts. . . In my opinion the more you know the better; it’s great to have someone you’re confidential with, someone you really trust. You don’t tell ‘secrets’ that friends have told you to others, NO MATTER WHAT; it’s a matter of principles (. . .). I don’t see

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The style of this posting is a hybrid between written and spoken mode, there is personal commitment as well as a direct challenge to the teacher and this is amplified by capital letters and exaggerated punctuation, also typical of online variants where lack of gestures must be compensated for. In the course of a short message, Harald has positioned and asserted himself through the use of a new medium and by drawing on multiple contexts, much the same way that Mei Li did, and in a manner I never observed during more traditional, written assignments or in face-to-face situations. Such commitment and positioning are also evident in the following response from Elisabeth in which she addresses Harald and at the same time makes an interpretation of Tom’s posting: FROM: Elisabeth (03/06/01 3:51 AM GMT -06:00) SUBJECT: Harald: I share your opinions, but what I also mean, and what I think Tom ment is that the better you know a person, the more it COULD hurt (it doesn’t HAVE TO hurt. . .) When you know a person THAT well, you know that persons thoughts and even feelings, and it’s sometimers easy to say or do something hurtful . . . But I agree 100% when you say that it’s great and SO valuable to have a friend THAT close. . .:)

Elisabeth’s response is sensitive to her classmate’s as well as her teacher’s intentions. She subtly moves between contexts and manages to address the topic on a more principled level. Like Harald, she uses many of the stylistic features so typical of online genres and also adds an emoticon at the end to signal a friendly attitude. Content-wise she extends and rebuilds the concept of relationship by drawing on contributions from two ostensible peers (Harald and Tom); the teacher’s institutional power is suspended in this situation. In the above postings the school script is complemented by out-ofschool contexts to the extent that we see a new script or ‘third space’ emerging at the interface of the two (Gutiérrez and Rymes, 1995; Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Watson-Gegeo, 2004). Also, as these exchanges can be followed by and responded to by the whole class and the teacher, Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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we see a many-to-many participatory genre, a multilogue, unfolding (Erickson, 1997; Murphy, 2000; Shank, 1993). This genre can be regarded as a particular template for mediated action in online environments. It transmits and preserves communicative and interactional moves among multiple agents across time, space and contexts. In this sense, we see the multilogue emerging as a potential boundary object. This makes it possible to engage learners on a collective level, sustain their participation, and make their communicative efforts analysable. In other words, we have a linguistic environment that affords practices and analyses of practices beyond the ephemeral quality of spoken communication and the often concealed or private quality of (individual) written communication. But this environment does not carry any institutional history, and has no curricular discourse and no standardized conventions. It is continually shaped and reshaped by the often unorthodox contributions where learners test the boundaries of linguistic as well as social conventions, e.g. as in the case of Espen’s and Harald’s contributions above, and the more radical departures found in the introductory example. b Teaching across multiple contexts: The empirical material shows how online contexts do not exist separately from offline contexts. It is impossible to understand the one without understanding the other; they are mutually constitutive of learning and teaching in technology-rich environments. However, development must be supported by more knowledgeable peers (Vygotsky, 1986). On some occasions, the teacher seems to be aware of this and exploits it, as he picks up on elements in learners’ lifeworlds to engage them in productive interactions. For example, in a previous session learners have been asked to write a report from a (fictitious) tense situation in Los Angeles where environmentalists clash with motorists, all acted out in the LMS. The teacher addresses Peter, who has written a rather violent account in the vein of Quentin Tarantino (whom Peter admires): Tom: How can you, how can you take a baseball bat and beat. . . Peter: (unintelligible) Tom: What did you] Peter: [golf club Tom: and well, what’s so much better about using a golf club? What about ethics, er, here at the end? Eh. . .this is almost like ‘Natural born killers’, just a lot of violence.

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This is said good naturedly, typical of the light-hearted atmosphere in this class. A little later, Tom addresses the class, instructing them how to deal with the many topics in the conference section of the LMS and inviting them to moderate their own conference. One of the volunteers is Peter. Whether Peter volunteers in order to improve Tom’s impression of him is pure conjecture, the important point is the context shift he signals. Tom makes use of the opportunity and upgrades Peter’s privileges with the right to create and run conferences. He also shows that he is aware of Peter’s recent history of endorsing violent descriptions: T: . . .but just keep it, eh. . . down to, yeah, well. (Softly) So you like Quentin, do you? Peter: Yeh (pause) T: Which one? Would you like to create a new one, or. . . do you like to run one of these, of these. . . Peter: Ehm. . . do I have to choose one of them? T: No. No you don’t, you can, eh. . . I’ll just, eh. . .I’ll just put you up here as a, as a teacher’s assistant and then you can, eh. . . create topics and edit, edit topics.

The softly spoken reference to Tarantino is a move away from the teacher’s to the learner’s script, thereby acknowledging Peter’s lifeworld. Peter, on the other hand seems to offer to enter the teacher’s script by volunteering to start a new conference topic. The logs show that Peter does not abuse his new-found power but posts a straightforward message. The type of EFL discourse found in Peter’s message is the social language of the classroom, far removed from his partiality to violent and even abusive language. It is brought about as a result of Tom ‘didacticizing’ a new communicative space and opening a third space. His intervention serves as a boundary object. However, it is typical that this happens in a face-to-face context. As Tom’s online presence is rarely felt beyond initial postings, similar teachable moments in the online setting are not fully exploited. Thus, the lack of boundary objects in the form of teacher interventions tends to make learners remain in their lifeworld contexts (linguistically as well as contentwise) when communicating online. There may be practical and organizational reasons for this. In one of the many talks immediately after class, Tom also points to the demands triggered by the hectic activities: One of the problems right now is to keep track of what they are occupied with, because I come across maybe one of 20 messages sent, there are 10–12 different conference topics. (. . .) What we should have, you know, maybe two–three teachers, one who was writing messages to trigger writing (. . .) and one who was there as a teacher of English (. . .) that would have been all right.

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3 The broader picture Mei Li, Espen, Harald, Elisabeth and Peter all draw on personal experience within the school discourse. Their lifeworlds as well as their articulation of these are mediated by new technologies. The result is a third space (Gutiérrez and Rymes, 1995; Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Leander, 2002) where different scripts meet and have the potential of expanding the object of learning EFL – provided there is knowledgeable support for contextual moves. The examples in Section IV-2 are not singular events. During the spring term, Tom’s class engaged in 20 different conference topics, 14 set off by the teacher, five by learners and one by an outsider (fellow teacher masquerading as a hacker). Although most of the messages were responses to the initial posting (63.7%), there were quite a few exchanges where learners responded to other learners’ responses (34.2%) and can thus be said to produce a multilogue type of communicative activity. Only 2.1% of all messages were off topic. What is illustrated is a communicative practice in which learners can become empowered through building a local but also polycontextual speech community mediated by networked technologies. But as the previous section has shown this does not happen automatically. While peers play an important role in constructing a collective zone of proximal development (Daniels, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978), participation from experts – teachers – is needed in order to design and orchestrate activities conducive to fostering discourse, communication and language skills that will serve learners across multiple contexts. In the case of the three teachers observed in the present study, their expertise can be summarized in the form of a generic pattern of activities executed in technology rich environments:





Learning is designed as activities that involve humans and artifacts and that interact in a variety of (unpredictable) ways. Tom’s use of the LMS is one such example. The activities that unfold are located at the interface of offline and online settings and involve multiple social languages. For teachers this involves exploiting elements in the design as well as reacting and responding to immediate needs and challenges. In computer-mediated communication multiple social spaces emerge and extend the zone of proximal development. Boundary objects that translate between such spaces are vital. Providing support for polycontextual practices proves to be extremely challenging. Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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As the empirical analysis shows, the social spaces that emerge are populated by teacher and learner roles that include scripts in the form of expectations from institutional discourse, as well as identities, i.e. how participants understand their own individual experience and how they construct their selves. The result is new scripts or ‘third spaces’ that offer opportunities in which teachers as well as learners engage in practices that draw on different social languages. The above relational and transformational processes all contribute to teachers’ appropriation of technologies. Elsewhere I have argued that such appropriation is a premise for developing teacher expertise (Lund, 2004b).

The practices of these teachers point to a notion of teaching that involves more than the school context and the curriculum as something to be delivered. What we see is a situation where teachers as well as learners need to acknowledge the increasing impact of linguistic diversity. To avoid confusion, linguistic relativism and teacher abdication we need to recognize didactics as a boundary object: a flexible but simultaneously robust educational practice that allows for local interpretations while giving direction and perspective to such interpretations.

V Discussion: didactics as boundary object The term teaching is commonly used to refer to the activities that make up teachers’ professionalism. In scholarly literature, pedagogy (the favoured Anglo-American term) or didactics (the favoured European term) are also used, but with no clear distinction between the two (Hamilton, 1999). In the present study, the latter term is used. Despite its perhaps normative connotations, it is closely associated with teacher education as well as classroom practices. Historically, didactics has been framed by questions such as what to teach, how to teach, why teach these topics, ideas, values etc., and to whom (Gundem, 1998). With web-based environments, we can add two more contextual dimensions: where to teach and when. The reason is that networked technologies have the capacity to transcend constraints of space and time: we can work from diverse locations and we can work synchronously, asynchronously and in mixed modes. In other words, didactics must embrace multiple Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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contexts. The implication is that relations found in the co-located classroom are only one possible configuration of what goes on between learners, teachers and the artifacts they use. As Section IV has sought to illustrate an online environment affords additional configurations, hence the notion of polycontextuality. A definition of didactics in this perspective should capture relations in co-located as well as distributed settings. A definition that does so would consider didactics as a social practice in which learners, teachers and artifacts are configured around a knowledge domain, and in which knowledge building is made visible by grouping knowledge into educational designs and activities. In the present study, we see how learners take part in practices that cross boundaries between school and out-ofschool contexts and how this is reflected in their use of Englishes. The latter context can be seen as an activity system made up by learners’ lifeworlds, the cultural horizon against which they experience, construe and understand their situation. Artifacts like the Internet are interwoven in these social practices: they become populated by young learners through their cultures-of-use. School can expand this horizon, but not by supplanting a lifeworld activity system with an authorized, ‘educationally approved’ variant. That would amount to pure reproduction of a particular cultural-historical discourse. Rather, where activity systems of schools and lifeworlds meet, participants – including teachers – must commute between the two. And it goes for artifacts too: when artifacts are relocated, the new context will instil them with certain expectations. Schools would not normally expect or accommodate language practices illustrated in the introductory example to the present article, while a chat session in an out-of-school context would expect these – they would be conventions. This situation presents us with one of the more challenging didactic situations in the wake of networked language practices, namely how to exploit, develop and cultivate functional language practices in the boundary zone between activity systems? The need for didactics to serve as a boundary object emerges. Learning and teaching in the boundary zone require that participants manage to interact in one situation and make this competence work in another situation. Relations to others and artifacts are reconstructed and reconfigured as participants move between activity systems. In the case of EFL, this involves polycontextual awareness and competence that teachers need to didacticize. One context is web-based Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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with its mostly unscripted, creative and often unconventional language practices. If such practices are subsumed under schooling normative components – found in curriculum, exams, approved textbooks and teacher control – it will violate learners’ lifeworlds as well as language as a dynamic concept. Institutional aspects represent a cultural-historical impact of such force that the relative influence of the two activity systems is far from symmetrical. We risk alienating young learners from school discourse if this is the only option available. On the other hand, if emerging practices are embraced uncritically and not contextualized we risk cultivating the laissez-faire classroom where the teacher abdicates responsibility and activities are mere fragments of a larger discourse. Between standardization and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity there is a third space where EFL didactics can emerge as a boundary object translating between different social worlds and discourses while maintaining consistency in the form of a shared goal (Star and Griesemer, 1989). In the present case such a goal would mean to appropriate EFL through multiple community memberships (Wenger, 1998). I would argue that Tom’s class display such horizontal expertise, although it may be in embryonic form and needs to be cultivated by more teacher intervention and participation in online discourse. Languages are dynamic and develop under shifting socio-economic needs and cultural-historical affordances and constraints. Meaning is not stored in languages but built as networks of interacting activity systems (Engeström et al., 1995). Language practices, including the New Englishes, must be understood in such a perspective. With a powerful artifact such as a digital network, EFL activities can be carried out in and across multiple contexts. However, as I have sought to demonstrate, a didactic component needs to support such boundary crossing in order to capture teachable moments. The boundary zone that materializes as a result of diverse practices is, by necessity, polycontextual and multivoiced – a third space where new opportunities for language learning emerge. In order to didacticize such spaces we need to design lessons, activities, and tasks that afford the creative, unstructured, multivoiced and often chaotic mode of learners’ lifeworlds. In the case of teacher Tom, I would argue that he succeeds in this; he has designed a learning environment that affords polycontextuality. However, he manages only Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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to participate, support and guide in co-located mode. The teachable moments that emerge in polycontextual online modus tend to remain opaque. Teaching across contexts is demanding since it means challenging the historically authorized variant of EFL as well as the practices that constitute such a variant. The implication is that educators may have to accept more variation in language practices than before and that what counts as EFL as a school subject may have to be renegotiated. But a possible reorientation should be directed towards functional and context-sensitive registers, conventions and norms. This approach requires teachers to be expert practitioners in web-based environments: they need to have appropriated artifacts (Grossman et al., 1999; Lund, 2004b) so that they can attune them to such goals. EFL didactics has often taken the culture, history and the native speaker of the language as a point of departure. However, we also need to look towards its horizon. People adapt language to meet new situations and new communicative opportunities and they adopt language that seems to be functional for such polycontextual practices. Web-based communication is but one of many contexts. A future-oriented EFL didactics will have to embrace practices we – paradoxically – cannot predict today. Didactics as a boundary object has to prepare for unexpected outcomes as learning becomes increasingly polycontextual. VI Conclusion This study has shown how language practices emerge across multiple contexts afforded by networked technologies. The questions raised were how we can understand this phenomenon and what the impact may be on teaching and learning. The results from the study show that the underlying activity system of teaching EFL is transformed. We see changes in the language taught, we see emergent cultures-of-use, and we see that language didactics involves a constant reconfiguration of human agents and artifacts around a subject and across different contexts. The data corpus that provides the extracts used in the present study shows that young learners introduce elements from one context into another as they traverse the boundary zone. What counts as teacher professionalism under such conditions is relational expertise: the ability to didacticize new spaces, to design and participate in activities conducive to language learning across multiple settings and that transcend classroom constraints Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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of time and space. Such spaces may present us with the unexpected, but they are also conducive to communicative innovation and development. This is where relational didactics as a boundary object can emerge with the potential to bridge and serve communicative practices developing under different cultural and historical circumstances. Acknowledgements The writing of this paper is supported by the strategic research effort Competence and Media Convergence (CMC) at the University of Oslo. For more information about CMC, see http://cmc.uio.no/. I thank fellow researchers at InterMedia, the University of Oslo for constructive critique as this text progressed. I also thank the editor of this issue and the reviewers for their valuable comments. VII References Bakhtin, M.M. 1979: The dialogic imagination. Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. University of Texas Press. Brutt-Griffler, J. 2004: World English: a study of its development. Multilingual Matters. Burleigh, J. 2004: English to be spoken by half the world’s population within 10 years. The Independent, 9 December. London. Crystal, D. 1998: English as a global language. Cambridge University Press. —— 2001: The future of Englishes. In Burns, A. and Coffin, C., editors, Analysing English in a global context. Routledge, 53–64. Daniels, H. 2001: Vygotsky and pedagogy. RoutledgeFalmer. Engeström, Y. 1999: Activity theory and individual and social transformation. In Engeström, Y., Miettinen, R. and Punamäki, R., editors, Perspectives on activity theory. Cambridge University Press, 19–38. Engeström, Y., Engeström, R. and Kärkkäinen, M. 1995: Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in expert cognition: learning and problem solving in complex work activities. Learning and Instruction 5: 319–36. Erickson, T. 1997: Social interaction on the net: virtual community as participatory genre. In Nunamaker, J.F. and Sprague, R.H., editors, Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. IEEE Computer Society Press, 23–30. Gee, J.P. 2000: New people in new worlds: networks, the new capitalism and schools. In Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M., editors, Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures. Routledge, 43–68. Downloaded from ltr.sagepub.com at Universitet I Oslo on February 25, 2015

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