Łódź Studies in Language Voice Assistants Action oriented Mediation Practice

The book sets out the latest European trends in foreign language teaching and learning. It provides a rationale for the use of voice assistance in a novel, action-oriented, learning-to-mediate programme implemented off-site among Polish secondary school learners of English as a foreign language in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The voice assistance notion gained wider recognition in the 2010s amidst the launch of mainstream voice-controlled software and apps, such as Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. Despite its potential linguistic and affective benefits, learners’ communication with such technologies has been understudied. Given the gaps in the CALL research, the book reports a mixed-methods investigation of voice assistance occurring in a novel context of task-based mediation practice by Polish secondary school learners of English. It brings together methodological, pedagogical, and technological trends in foreign language education in Europe by setting out such principal buzzwords as action-orientation, mediation, and human-machine communication. It also provides an analysis of the selected European and Polish educational legislation and statistical reports to give further insights into the problem of mediation practice and English as a foreign language learning and teaching. The monograph makes an original contribution to the field of computer-assisted language learning, and specifically to the emerging subfield of intelligent CALL accessed on mobile devices. It addresses the acquisition of an important skill in language use and language learning, namely mediation. The research is presented against a background of evolving ideas on language education in Europe and in relation to the specific circumstances pertaining to education in Poland. Prof. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme‘s Review (The Open University, UK)