Announcing Critical CALL Across Institutions and Borders
I’m very pleased to announce the publication launch of Advancing Critical CALL Across Institutions and Borders: Reimagining Possibilities for Languages, Literacies, and Cultures. This is a book I have co-edited alongside four editors, Drs. Angelika Kraemer, Theresa Austin, Hengyi Liu, and Xinyue Zuo. It includes 25 authors, who are based across many countries in the globe. We have been grateful to receive additional editorial support from the book series editor, Dr. Steph Link as well as editorial staff at University of Toronto Press.
In this book, we recognize Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) as a field that is not neutral nor apolitical. Advocating for “Critical CALL” we ask language teachers and students to question unexamined assumptions at the base of technology use in language learning. We pay attention to the ways that technology-enhanced instruction can disrupt social inequities, as well as ways it can exacerbate them.
This volume’s goal is to foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) for multilingual learners and their teachers within technology-enhanced spaces. We posit that Critical CALL is enacted through building relationships and collaborations that are transnational and interinstitutional in their nature.
The background story for this book
While this book is not about the COVID-19 pandemic, its impetus started in the throes of it–the winter of 2020-2021. With some time and distance, I can call this period “the covid winter” with some endearment, despite the pain and hardship it brought to myself (alongside so many other language learners and teachers across the world) in the moment.
Just a few months before the covid winter, my husband and I had relocated to Ithaca, New York. Ithaca is a small city upstate, identified as one of “the most unequal places in the state” by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As we rented out a small and quiet apartment on the eastern edge of town boundaries, I gained a more intimate familiarity with inequality. At the time, I was still a graduate student, and my husband was starting a postdoc at Cornell University. Living there, we were fortunate to see deer, sunflower fields, and field horses with regularity, yet most signs of civilization remained at least a 15 minute drive away. We had no preexisting family nor social connections to the area. Making new friends locally was really hard during a time when most people we knew were afraid to enter others’ homes.
We turned to the internet to meet our needs for human connection, where online communities were abundant.
The road near our apartment in Ithaca
I had been wanting to study Azerbaijani, my husband’s mother tongue, more formally and I found out about a free online exchange offered by the Azerbaijan Cultural Society of Northern California. This language program, offered weekly on Saturday mornings, provided a wonderful opportunity for us to connect to other Azerbaijani speakers across the country and the world. The teacher was based in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. She connected to us on the East Coast in her late evenings after work. Other students connected from locations all over the United States. While the program was advertised for beginning students, I quickly found that it was actually far above my level as a beginner. With meager options available to learn the language in the US, nearly all other participants were heritage speakers of Azerbaijani, who were born in the US, and had grown up hearing the language in their homes far longer than I had as a second language learner. This is why my husband sat next to me every lesson, helping me participate. In our winter of social isolation, we much looked forward to attending class every Saturday–coffee cups and notebooks in hand–to forge new friendships online.
Sadly, after a few months, the virtual exchange program was discontinued–it added too much to the teacher’s workload and was unsustainable for her in the long term.
Still, I had gained from this virtual class an awareness of the expansive power of virtual exchange for language learning. I decided to find my own Azerbaijani teacher, Lamiya who I have been meeting for four years now. Lamiya was born in North Azerbaijan, while my in-laws live in South Azerbaijan. Our long-term exchange has therefore opened the possibility for both of us to learn about differences in the Northern and Southern varieties. For example, in the North, breakfast is “səhər yeməyi” (morning food) but in the South, breakfast is “suphanə”.
Our covid winter in Ithaca
Map of Azerbaijani-speaking world.
dark blue = majority Azerbaijani
light blue = minority Azerbaijani
During the covid winter, I sought ways to become more grounded in the local language community Ithaca. I was fortunate to become connected to the Language Resource Center (LRC) at Cornell, which fosters technology use in language teaching across institutions. The LRC’s Director, Angelika Kraemer (also one of our volume’s coeditors) hired me to coordinate several language initiatives at the LRC, including the Shared Course Initiative (SCI), which she directs from the Cornell side. The SCI involves interinstitutional course sharing of less commonly taught languages (via distance education) across three universities: Yale, Cornell, and Columbia. While also coordinating the LRC's Conversation Hours I realized the power of videoconferencing technology to help bring together Cornell's Azerbaijani-speaking students, staff, and alumni living across the country through monthly conversational meetings (which we held on zoom). Even after I left Ithaca, moving across the country to St. Louis, MO in 2023, I managed to continue virtual language exchanges with that original group of Azerbaijani speakers, connecting with individuals located in Azerbaijan, Washington D.C., as well as the states of New York and Washington.
Me outside of the LRC
Distance education in the SCI through Cornell, Columbia, and Yale
At the same time, our other three volume coeditors were busy enacting language technologies, partnerships, and exchanges in each of their own contexts. Volume co-editor Theresa Austin sought creative ways to enhance Critical CALL through university and K12 school partnerships. The chapter she co-authored with lead author and K12 language teacher, Lulu Ekiert, titled “Using Technology and Art in a Middle School Exploratory Heritage Language Program: Diversity Matters” describes the manner through which a three-way partnership–between a university, school, and community–were forged to offer multilingual learners authentic experiences constructing, curating, and exhibiting digitally-mediated artwork. At the same time, volume co-editor Hengyi Liu found himself unexpectedly immersed in virtual language exchange when a Japanese high school English language learner he had tutored in the US became immobile during a visit to Japan. Their English tutorials moved online, across transnational borders and time zones. Co-editor Xinyue Zuo similarly found herself unexpectedly pivoting and forging relationships with her dissertation study participants–language interpreters in public schools–through online modalities during this time.
Moving forward
Flashing forward to the spring of 2025, more than four years forward since the book’s inception, we assert that Critical CALL continues to be realized through collaborations that are transnational and interinstitutional in their nature.
We invite you to take up our agenda, and learn more about possibilities for partnership in Critical CALL, which are represented thematically across three sections of the book 1) CALL In/Through Transnational and Community-Oriented Learner Exchange, 2) CALL In/Through Less Commonly Taught Languages, and 3) CALL In-Through Teacher Professional Development. We hope that our readers gain insights into the ways criticality can be advanced in their contexts, as well as inspiration to cultivate interinstitutional and transnational collaborations in support of language teaching and learning.
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