Introduction
Teaching and learning have been described as processes that involve the participation of different actors. In mainstream pedagogy and particularly normative educational trends (Vieluf et al., 2012), teachers play an overriding role as principal transmitters or mediators (facilitators) of linguistic and cultural knowledge to students, in terms of the traditional and alternative pedagogies, correspondingly. Indeed, various teaching perspectives ranging from traditional approaches to post method views (Kumaravadivelu, 2001) advocate for the interaction between teachers and learners through language. Nevertheless, little has been said about the role of resources or materials created, adapted or adopted in class, and even less in the Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) class. When didactic materials are mentioned or referred to, only instrumental purposes are assigned to them. Objects and devices mediating the process of language-learners also deserve attention in the critical and reflective educational discussion. We thus conducted this study to acknowledge the role of printed and digital materials both integrated in Spanish learning to mediate intercultural and linguistic practices and to carry out research on the subject.
As a starting point of this research, we analyzed an online social network for learning languages such as Spanish. To achieve so, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) strategies were employed. Sociocultural, pedagogical and linguistic viewpoints shed light on the research problem that revolved, specifically, around the geopolitics of linguistic knowledge in digital materials for L2 virtual education. This phenomenon appeared in visual and alphabetical language based on ethnocentric and monoglot ideologies that lead to practices such as the glottophobie2 (Blanchet, 2016) within digital scenarios for language learning. Additionally, we also found this social network tended to promote second generationbased interactional practices in Distance Education (DE) despite technological dynamic mechanisms and support available in a digital era. According to Adams (2016, p. 2), the telecommunication or second generation of DE involves “the telephone, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing capabilities”.
Subsequently, the research question stated for this study was: How does a bilingual didactic guide in media created by teacher-researchers provide opportunities for Spanish intercultural learning in a hybrid environment? It is worth clarifying that from now on when we talk about “in media”, we refer to both multimedia and multimodal possibilities of learning. Thus, the general objective is framed within developing a bilingual (Spanish-English) and blended didactic guide for Spanish intercultural learning. More precisely, we had a threefold purpose: to create, apply and evaluate a locally developed material for SFL, beyond the mere elaboration in itself.
In the present article, we account for the process of developing the didactic material for Spanish learning and for evaluating its implementation with an expert sample (Sampieri et al, 2010), who also played the role of a student. Firstly, we discuss the theoretical concepts informing our research. Secondly, we describe the characteristics of this study along with the data collection tools and the material creation process. Thirdly, we discuss the findings, which are organized in different subcategories distributed in groups that explain the main category (Materialese). It deals with how materials interact with learners to construct spaces for intercultural communication and their role in students’ learning. This complex category and concept participates in the process of emergence and self-organization in Maldonado’s terms (2015). We reflect upon some of the tenets highlighted by our participant-user of this didactic guide, who characterizes the multimodal and intercultural voice that the category: Materialese refers to. Finally, we draw some conclusions on the role of intercultural materials integrated for constructing a voice to interact with emergent bilinguals in a digital era.
Literature review
Applied linguistics constitutes the field of study that theoretically informs this research. As this field is an interdisciplinary one, the research phenomenon or problem under study is approached from the social psycholinguistic area of complexity (Maldonado & Gómez, 2010; Maldonado, 2015). This means psycholinguistic and cognitive processes involved in language learning are linked to a social context in which culture-language connection comes into view (Kramsch, 2013). Precisely, language learning would be a cognitive and psycholinguistic process affected by social conditions and factors that occur in different cultural communities. Building on this, the present section discusses our key concepts by following this sequence: compound bilingualism and intercultural practices; materials development and blended learning in a digital era with a focus on learning Spanish as a second/foreign language.
According to Richards and Rodgers (2014), EFL methodologies are rooted in SLA principles. Although theories about brain functioning related to SLA are not definite, Cummins (2005) proposes an interesting perspective to explain the possible psycholinguistic process involved in SLA, and thus it became a principle applied to language didactics. Cummins (2005) asserts that there seems to be a common underlying proficiency or an area in our brain shared by L1 and L2, and which consequently shares the same sort of knowledge (Figure 1). Bilingual information might not be separately stored in the brain, but interdependently. That is why Aslam-Sipra (2013) suggests that bilingualism is a teaching resource that does not diminish communicative abilities but indeed can support their development. In other words, we refer to the interrelation among languages and thus the positive effect of bilingual education (Morales, Calvo & Bialystok, 2013). Bilingual strategies are one example of the methodological applications of this SLA principle in the language class (Cummins, 2005).
Baker (2006) argues that the benefit of languages connected as resources is not only cognitive or psychological, but also communicative and social. This author adds that languages as resources support the construction of social bridges towards an intercultural comprehension. In fact, learning and using different languages allow the agent-learner to engage in experiences in various cultures (British Council, 2001). In this way, we appeal to Michael Byram’s (1991) definition of interculturality as the opportunity to exchange experiences among members of different cultures. His position is similar to Alsina’s (2012) who expresses that humans construct culture from the communities of sense to which they belong. This cultural understanding springs from humans’ experience when interacting, since culture depends on communication and thus, language is involved. This is to say culture is understood from an interactionist perspective (Alsina, 2012; Richards & Rodgers, 2014) that makes it a living phenomenon constantly coded and recoded through language.
In contrast, monolingual bilingualism (Ismail, 2012) is based on the separated underlying proficiency in which languages are kept apart from each other as they are stored in different areas of the brain (Cummins, 2005). This SLA principle also influences language didactics. Some illustrations are the Direct Method and the Communicative Approach, which promote using the target language as the only means of communication, to the detriment of learners’ previous linguistic knowledge (L1) insofar as the mother tongue is deemed as an obstacle for learning the target language (Harmer, 2007; Richards & Rodgers, 2014).
Since languages are linked to culture (Kramsch, 2013), we interpret the separated bilingualism as ethnocentric: languages are not only separated, but also the myriad cultures behind them. In fact, this author adds, an individual can represent many cultures—and they are coded through language. Therefore, disjunction bilingualism implies unconnected cultures and fragmented identities in an individual (Wodak, 2013). For the reason that there is no clear or definite psycholinguistic or neurological support to state that languages must be separated while learning them, we relate this didactic decision to a sociocultural reason. Knowledge in any matter has been assigned or attributed to certain countries for political and economic factors. Mignolo (2000) and Walsh (2003) understand this phenomenon as the geopolitics of knowledge. That is why disjunction discourses (Aldana, 2012; 2014) influencing language didactics—such as the linguistic imperialism or the native speaker fallacy (Guerrero & Quintero, 2016; Aldana, 2014) —come into view in methodologies and didactic materials for language teaching and learning.
As a response to disjunction discourses supported by geopolitics of knowledge, Mignolo (2012) underlies the border thinking alternative. This one in turn has to do with the possibility to construct and communicate knowledge from both the interior and exterior borders of colonial thought. Each community has its own local histories and global phenomena (e.g. interculturality) depend on the particularities of those histories. Border thinking emerges when the coloniality of power in Asia, Africa and America (Walsh, 2003) is articulated, and thus producing “an other” comprehension situated in the local, as explained by Mignolo (2012, p. 67).
Didactics, teaching and learning practices in all areas (including Spanish) depend on resources or materials to complement and, hopefully, facilitate didactic processes. Any object that can have an impact on students learning could be labeled as didactic material (Tomlinson, 2011). Didactic materials may have an impact on psychological and even social dimensions of the language learner (Tomlinson, 2011; Rico (2012). Due to the importance of materials in the learning process, the domain: materials development emerges as one area of action in the Applied Linguistics (AL) field. Within the materials development domain from AL field, didactic resources are analyzed, evaluated, adopted, adapted and developed, involving agents and products directly or indirectly—namely, teachers, students, designers, advisors, administrative staff, programs, curricula… (Rico. Cited in Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2010).
Materials for learning a language have ranged from the board to the ICTs, accompanying humanity development (Blake, 2013). From the critical stance, these didactic objects can be understood as technologies to be employed not only for instrumental but also for reflection purposes (Blake, 2013), insofar as they can stand for production spaces where discourses are circulating (Martín-Barbero, 2009). In this line of thought, blended learning as a didactic methodology calls for the integration of media and connectivism (So & Brush, 2007). Blended learning connects different types of technologies (analogous and digital) and it constitutes the third generation of distance education (So & Brush, 2007). In sum, didactic materials stand for technologies and when they are integrated for a didactic purpose in a digital era, they support teaching methodologies such as blended learning.
Methodology
The research paradigm was the qualitative one. According to Johnson and Christensen (2008), humans’ behavior as part of reality can be studied from a wide and holistic perspective. In doing so, description, understanding and construction of reality through research is attainable from multidimensional or interdisciplinary ground rather than from a reductionist perspective (Maldonado, 2015). This research was descriptive-interpretive and unfolded within the grounded theory design from the stance of Strauss and Glasser (cited in Hernández Sampieri et al., 2010). Data collection techniques included field notes during the implementation stage where we applied the nonparticipant observation. Photographs of the material developed were also triangulated with the other data collection instruments. Lastly, the expert’s perceptions on the material’s potential impact were also collected through the rubrics designed for the evaluation of the didactic resource.
Purposeful sampling was the technique applied for selecting our information-rich case; particularly, we considered the expert sample. In this study, one of the criteria our sample had to meet was being an adult; having experience on materials adoption, adaptation and development; working as a teacher of Spanish as a Foreign Language, and speaking more than one language. This expert sample used the didactic material from the student-user role to evaluate the resource at the end.
In relation to the methodological path for instructional materials creation, Tomlinson suggests one by Jolly and Bolitho (cited in Tomlinson, 2011) where research processes behind materials development take place. These authors propose seven stages within this path through the following sequence: identification, exploration, contextual realization, pedagogical realization, production of materials, application and evaluation (Tomlinson, 2011). This series of stages are proposed as a guide for creating didactic materials in an informed manner in which the design phase is one of the steps to follow, as opposed to being the only phase. It is worth underlying there are multiple methodological paths to develop materials and this study has articulated some of them in relation to the one presented in Tomlinson’s proposal.
Findings
In this section, we discuss the final emergent category through the explanation of the subcategories attached to it. We applied both the open and axial coding through the grounded theory as the data analysis approach in our study. Methodological triangulation was selected to validate our final category and its subcategories. Needless to say, our material is part of our results and it is displayed through photographs as samples to support our interpretations of field notes and the expert’s perceptions. Figure 2 provides the followon graphic that displays our findings and also indicates the connections among the category and subcategories.
Materialese: the voice of materials
The central category, Materialese, stems from the lexical unit: material. This concept refers to the voice didactic materials gain during and after the process of development to interact with learners as users from border thinking perspectives. Since it is a new concept in the literature, and since it came up in the course of this research, we explain its origins and roots initially founded on two theoretical concepts. In First Language Acquisition (FLA), mother talk has revealed an influence on child language development. Pasaribu (2012) along with other authors, label it as motherese and remark that this specific language use involves constant diminutives, questions, imperatives, redundancy and emphasis on certain lexical units through prosodic features (intonational and stress patterns). In Pasaribu’s (2012) investigation, the same language characteristics were notorious in children’s language use, which assimilated to caregivers’ input.
Similarly, further research is conducted about the changes made on the way teachers talk when interacting with students (Álvarez Cederborg, 1991). Teachers seem to adjust their language when interacting with learners to the extent that this use displays oversimplification, according to Van Lier (2013). Due to the fact that this strategy resembles what mothers do with language, adjusted teachers’ talk receives the name of teacherese (Van Lier, 2013). Indeed, some authors identify further prosodic changes in teacherese than those existing in the motherese. As a matter of fact, these adjustments in both teachers’ and mothers’ language to communicate with students and children respond to the definitive goal intended to make input comprehensible and appealing for supporting the learning process (Hummel, 2014).
Nevertheless, teaching and learning practices encompass participants other than educators and students in the canonical manner we know them. Indeed, didactic materials can also perform the role of mediating linguistic and cultural knowledge in our learners’ process (Baquero, Fuertes & Gama, 2015; Rico, 2012). As materials communicate messages to the learners as users, they seem to acquire a voice to interact with the learner. By applying the same morphological pattern from those concepts and adding the suffix -ese which is used to describe things and places’, such as people and languages spoken (Wiktionary, n.d.), the concept materialese emerges. We define it as the particular and polyphonic language use didactic materials have for interacting with learners. When developing materials, this voice is shaped during and after the process (Figure 3). The next lines will expand on this assertion.
In this sample, the same section from the digital environment in our blended material is presented before and after its use. In firsthand, the multimodal (Kress & Leeuwen, 2001; 2002) and polyphonic voice of the didactic resource, or what we have coined as materialese, displays a visual language which combines light background with dark color font. From the semiotics of color viewpoint, this color strategy conveys harmony and calmness because of its complementarity (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2002). Additionally, font size is bigger on certain alphabetical texts; therefore, through this semiotic strategy, materialese may be calling users’ attention to questions in contrast to answers. All of these semiotic resources are part of the materials’ voice to communicate multimodal messages.
Materialese is also enriched by the alphabetical text that supports its multimodal quality. Figure 3 shows the use of written language in Spanish to provide instructions for the development of activity 1. The instruction’s content had to do with choosing a field in which each piece of news about Gabo’s death was placed. The aim of this activity was to foster analysis and interpretation of electronic texts as an extralinguistic skill in learners. Use of language communicated closeness due to the familiar mode (tuteo) as a mitigating tool in instructions presented directly as imperative sentences charged with demands as illocutionary forces (Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams, 2011), e.g. choose the social area where the news’ author placed the event about Gabo’s death (prompt in question 1, figure 3). Additionally, the materialese in this case seemed to perform the role of helper for students to the extent that it added a note on how to develop the activity by employing the printed material connected to the digital one. It is worth keeping in mind that the material developed in the present study was founded on the blended learning didactic option (So & Brush, 2007). Materialese was also voiced through alphabetical texts that were presented in the resources of the didactic object to communicate with students while they use it for learning purposes.
As soon as the user answered the form (the below area in Figure 3) with questions about the three electronic texts in our didactic material, he became a prosumer (González and Rincón, 2013) who also interacted with the didactic object and complemented its voice while learning. The user’s choices in Figure 3 transformed the Materialese in the electronic resource through his interpretation about a text. This means learners and teachers contribute to didactic objects’ Materialese, which may be complemented only when employed by human beings. However, this threefold material-student-teacher interaction should not be unidirectional, but bidirectional. Communication processes and reciprocal feedback between the Materialese and students as key prosumers implies an active participation of both. It overcomes the behavioristic model of communication and learning (Richards and Rodgers, 2014) usually promoted in didactic methodologies and materials, and the objectification of technology (Blake, 2013).
In the case of the created material, a kind of polyphonic voice came into light as Bakhtin (Cited in Angermuller, Maingueneau and Wodak, 2014) would express. Firstly, this digital form (Figure 3) asks learners questions about their understandings ofthe news texts through visual and alphabetical language. Bilingual teachers, SLA theorists’, didactic alternatives proponents’ and even graphic designers’ contributions intersect to build up a polyphonic discourse within the material (Bakhtin as cited in Angermuller, Maingueneau and Wodak, 2014) to interact with learners. The combination of individual voices artistically organized to dialogue around communication along with teaching and learning mediated by multimodal languages (e.g. the L1-L2 connected language) became manifest in the concrete material of this study. That condition allowed for a polyphonic voice in the didactic resource to communicate with the user learner.
Materialese or the voice of materials emerges not only as an unavoidable and neglected condition of didactic tools, but also as a product of the multiple theoretical and methodological variables of the process. In other words, we refer to materialese as a complex category in constant relationship to different factors. They seem to work as intervening conditions, causes, consequences, actions and interactions (Hernández Sampieri et al., 2010; Maldonado, 2015). We will explain this category through the subcategories that represent its core dimensions as follows.
Bilingual and intercultural nuances of materialese
The Common Underlying Proficiency model or CUP (Cummins, 2005) opens the possibilities for our material to apply bilingual strategies (Cummins, 2005) on the content presented in our object for learning (Cacheiro, 2011). Since Baker (2006) along with Creese and Blackledge (2010) understand languages as resources, their integration within a psycholinguistic principle translates into a bilingual strategy in our material—and the expert also perceived it. As an illustration, we have the bilingual texts in the complementary printed guide (Figure 4) originally published as monolingual in media sites, and the prompts in the digital and printed resources connected in our didactic material (Figures 4 and 5). Texts chosen were authentic manuscripts selected by the highest number of words, and the expert commented on this aspect (three journal news online as media, figures 5 and 6). Both new and previous frameworks of reference coined through languages and cultural experiential knowledge are linked. In this manner, pieces of news around Gabo’s death in mass media communication (Figure 5), which we used as our text sample, were transformed into a didactic resource in the Spanish as a foreign language material (Center for Media Literacy, 2003).
Subsequently, materialese in our didactic resource seemed to support the connections between different types of knowledge (L1, L2, students’ experiences, cultures, a writer’s life story …) in such a way that meaningful learning along with cognitive flexibility were stimulated in the didactic object developed. On the one hand, the bilingual strategy allowed for association processes in Spanish learning that could potentially lead the student-user to meaningful learning (Van Lier, 2008). As argued by Chimbutane (2011), L1 should be included in the teaching practice if the objective is exactly the meaningful learning whose basis is the psycholinguistic interdependence between languages and thus, egalitarian acknowledgement (de Mejía, 2006).
Along these lines, cognitive flexibility appears as a relevant condition in emergent bilinguals (Meskill, Mossop and Bates, 1999), and materialese responds to it. These emergent bilinguals’ characteristic (interaction through the interface to read and write electronic texts in different languages) is supported by their cognitive flexibility (Meskill et al., 1999). Wiseheart, Wiswanathan and Bialystok (2014) assert that the abovementioned flexibility allows for solving syntactic, semantic and sociocultural problems. From this perspective, the bilingual learner makes sense of the world through this flexibility, moving through dual and even multiple language systems of thought and world representations (Meskill, Mossop & Bates, 1999). For instance, Spanish learners are asked to explore reactions of three countries to Gabo’s death (Figure 6) in the material created. For this, learners should read the interlinear texts in the printed resource (Figure 4) and critically analyze them as in question 2 of the digital form. Specifically, they need to identify news authors’ tone in their texts, stimulating discourse analysis abilities in students (Figure 7). Negotiation of meaning on Gabo’s death (a natural and cultural fact) and constructed in mother and target languages is constantly taking place within the development of activities (Figure 7) and supported by the technical mechanism: Deja un comentario (Comment), as we can see in Figure 8.
Negotiation of meaning in dual and multiple systems of linguistic knowledge (as shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5) also seemed to shed light on the intercultural dimension of our didactic object’s voice. The connectivist strategy, in the form of mother language/target language, may lead to intercultural communication processes (Alsina, 2012). Indeed, when we refer to dual and even multiple systems of thought, we are pointing to cultural worldviews and practices attached that can be interpreted in a dialogical space for meaning exchange (Alsina, 2012). What seemed an abstract psycholinguistic principle (Common Underlying Proficiency) implied a sociocultural reason for the material we developed. Two alphabetical languages and other multimodal (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) resources already discussed (images, colors, sizes…) allowed for an encounter of cultures (Gruzinsky, 2006; Vizer, 2005) through the bilingual materialese. The expert also pointed it out when highlighting the importance of including simultaneously in the learning process, and creating an encounte between students’ mother and target languages. (Figure 9, Excerpt 1).
Excerpt 1. Perceptions about the material developed in this research
The didactic material is highly interesting and to my mind, I feel identified with everything, even the foundations behind it. I identify with the idea of employing students’ mother tongue, translation and other important tools for L2 learning. Congratulations.
The voice of this material or materialese may communicate with learners in a possible shared space where geo-politic borders (Mignolo, 2000) between languages and the cultural communities behind them (Kramsch, 2013) may disappear and are not separate from each other, as would be the aim in the material’s interlinear texts (Figure 4). Indeed, communities build up cooperative bridges (Beeman & Urrow, 2013) through which they construct cultural meanings and share experiences coded through multimodal languages in an intercultural environment. The three electronic texts (Figure 10) digitally linked as the core of our blended material exemplify this feature.
At this point, culture in the language class is understood from a communitarian standpoint (Vizer, 2005; González, 2017), i.e. culture may be constructed by agents (e.g. teachers and students) together through praxis once different communities of sense encounter (Rizo, 2013), as in our material. In this interaction, subaltern and dominated communities are restated and positioned in a new paradigm where border thinking looks for new intersections among them without radical and binary positions (Mignolo, 2000; Walsh, 2003). That is why materialese in our didactic object involved responses to Gabo’s death as linked to learners’ cultural and language experiences integration (Byram and Buttjies, 1991). Examples of this are shown in figures 4 and 8. Indeed, translation worked as a special tool to absorb the colonial difference in our material (Mignolo, 2000).
Furthermore, this material’s bilingual voice challenges the colonial difference and implied power relationships (Blanchet, 2016) that underpin the concept of Foreign Language (FL). Understanding a language as foreign produces in the learner a feeling of estrangement that keeps him or her at a distance. Subsequent Glottophobie (Blanchet, 2016) and other sociocultural discriminations could be reduced through bilingual strategies that support nonhierarchical interactions and languages connections in the materialese, as border thinking (Mignolo, 2000). Both the bilingual strategies applied in our material and the connection among cultural experiences within the same dialogical space seemed to serve as the intersection of local histories (Gabo’s death along with the reactions to it) and global designs from the perspectives of the local in terms of Mignolo (2000). For that reason, the materialese in our didactic object advocated for a reevaluation of colonial labels attributed to Spanish as a foreign language and suggested an alternative one that relied on bilingual and biliteracy practices.
Materialese in the postindustrial era
Initially, didactic materials refer to any object that has an impact on students’ learning processes (Tomlinson, 2011). This means they play the role of technologies defined as tools that have accompanied and supported the development of humanity (Blake, 2013). Therefore, by this perspective, the entire spectrum, from the board and markers to the internet and mobiles, could potentially work as didactic materials for language learning. Our didactic material integrated analogous and digital resources for learning (Cacheiro, 2011) around a transversal issue (Gabo’s death) in multiple media that depended on each other (Figure 11). Specifically, the materialese in our didactic object constituted a macro-narrative (Figure 12) as a hybrid electronic text (So and Brush, 2007; Meskill, Mossop y Bates, 1999). Technology integration around a macronarrative in our materialese articulated linguistic memories (Mignolo, 2000) to be read from diverse cultural systems of meaning (languages, images, colors…). In a nutshell, our material voice seemed to imply a multimodal (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) and transmedia learning process.
The convergence of media for contents circulation in a digital era (Jenkins. Cited in Scolari, 2013) through a blend of materialese was coherent with the intercultural and bilingual strategies as alternatives to monolingual bilingualism (Ismail, 2012). When talking about interculturality, bilingualism and blended environments, the connection corresponded to the relevant node (Downes & Siemens, 2007) that supported the three of them. It means that moving from one resource to another appeared as a critical and relevant learning process in the materialese. Thus, the voice of our didactic object can potentially respond to the theory of learning in a postindustrial era (Estudillo García, 2001), known as connectivism. In other words, the voice of our didactic materials may support cognitive flexibility in emergent bilinguals for them to communicate through and with different scenarios for learning together, which was the aim of our material in this study (Figure 11).
Conclusions
After carrying out this research study, we can conclude three important ideas. At first, materials, resources or technologies (other participants in the learning environment) also establish a communication process with students through a particular talk. This one, in turn, can involve bilingual and intercultural resources and strategies that imply cognitive flexibility and spaces for students to reflect from border thinking. This means students can learn languages by using and, mainly, connecting them together with cultural manifestations or practices, setting aside hierarchies or colonial labels for differences. Didactic materials are not transmitters of information, but further supporting resources and scenarios for creating multiple dialogues in heterarchical levels of discussion. The concept created to define the voice of materials from the perspective we addressed is materialese. In constrast to motherese or teacherese, materialese replaces oversimplification into cognitive flexibility and bilingual strategies for communication practices and learning. Secondly, the integration of tools intended to have an impact on students’ processes seems consistent with the theory of learning in the digital era and it demanded previously mentioned cognitive flexibility, supported by bilingual and intercultural strategies. And, thirdly, creating and evaluating didactic language materials may need complex and critical viewpoints and attitudes in teachers as developers rather than as users only. Materials development may not constitute an instrumental domain in Applied Linguistics as a field, but another critical area of action for language teachers as critical agents.