Innovation in Language Learning

The new social media-driven phenomenal communicative modes transform e-learning and e-sharing experience in and beyond different linguistic and cultural spaces; like the Facebook or Twitter, socio-economic activities at a global scale seem more and more borderless and just-in-time, allowing most forms of communication: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many. The ever-increasingly opening-up of cyber-experience for “inter-personalized” mediated communication, facilitates the interactivity, timeliness, active participation, and the cross-border/cultural encounters in/beyond both in virtual and real social communities. Yet the challenges for cross (or multi-) cultural and temporal-spatial communication in both cyberspace and the real world, quest for not just linguistic (text, semantic and phonetic) adaptation but also audio-visual interactive revolution, towards the communicative capacity building for Lingua Franca: all shaping our linguistic adaptive skills, say the least to acquire the basics of foreign language(s) as the core part of our new cross-cultural encounters in a globalizing world. As cross-cultural exchanges are mostly mediated by Lingua Franca in 21st Century information age, ICT-driven linguistic world transformations are more than obvious with inter-and-cross-linguistic mainstreaming. Juxtaposing the dominance of English as Lingua Franca (over 50% of the world webpage), in/beyond cyberspace; there is yet strong a rejuvenation and revitalization of local (new and highly differentiated cyber-) languages. All these mediated multilingual communications have been instrumental to further stimulating social innovations for progressive inter-cultural exchanges, questionably benefiting e-learning at large. This paper examines the new epoch of (e-)learning for new languages; as cyber-linkages are revolutionary in changing the mode of socio-cultural interactions, global-locally, behavioural repertoires among people in different geographical regions and time zones. The most important aspect is the enabling of multilingual, cross-and-inter-cultural communication – hence learning from, with a discovery of, new experience. Critically examining policy issues on (new) language for e-learning and cross-cultural communication in/beyond cyberspace, it highlights the challenges and contradictions on the way for multilingualism in a globalizing world.