Dr. Janina Brutt-Griffler and Dr. Namsook Kim discuss ‘multilingualism and e-learning’ in their chapter that appears in ‘The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research‘ (2016).

This chapter situates multilingualism in the context of national/transnational language policy initiatives and transnationalism and aligns it with educational initiatives in the domain of the use of technologies and new media (e-learning). It provides a broad discussion of research on the impact and effectiveness of e-learning in promoting multilingualism. From the standpoint of educational policies, we observe a worldwide trend towards introducing foreign/second language education earlier in school systems with the goal of developing advanced levels of proficiency in languages and the concern to give access to linguistic resources to populations across the various occupational domains. Our review of contemporary literature concludes that e-learning–utilizing an extended range of network-based information and communication technologies that include Web 2.0 technologies, software, corpora, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, technology-supported glossing, an intelligent web-based instruction system, (a)synchronous video-web communication, and tablets–facilitates to promote multilingualism among language users across specific language skills—writing, reading and vocabulary, speaking, and listening—and that e-learning also contributes to twenty-first century teacher education and professional development in the digital era and the notable increase in transnational collaborations in research studies

Click here to view/download the chapter: Multilingualism and Elearning (Brutt-Griffler & Kim, 2016)

The APA Style citation of this book chapter is as follows:

Brutt-Griffer, J., & Kim, N. (2016). Multilingualism and e-learning. In C. Haythornthwaite, R. Andrews, J. Fransman & E. Meyers (Eds.). The SAGE handbook of e-learning research (2nd ed., pp. 187-208). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.