Digital Mediations: A Report on Digital Transformations in Modern Languages

This report presents the conclusions of research on the ‘Digital Mediations’ strand of the AHRC-funded Language Acts and Worldmaking project. The research included several landscape reports and experimental initiatives carried out to explore how digital pedagogies, tools and research methods are (or should be) embedded in current Modern Languages practice, and what implications this has for future policy in the field. It aimed to contribute to wider debates about the nature and significance of digital mediations involving Modern Languages and Cultures, and to assess the critical competences required to negotiate them effectively. The research studied the interactions between digital culture and language education in both directions – both the role digital culture and technology play in transforming Modern Languages research and learning, and the role the Modern Languages has in helping us to better understand digital culture, whose global and multilingual nature is often marginalised and under-researched.

The report focuses largely on Higher Education in the UK, while making connections to other national/regional realities and to digital mediations at school level language education. It understands ‘Modern Languages’ in the broadest possible sense, including community, heritage and non-European languages, and connected closely to cognate fields such as Area studies, Linguistics and Translation studies. It concludes with general recommendations, which are based on a UK perspective but many of which are likely to be applicable to other anglophone contexts.