Innovation in Language Learning

Powered by active social participation in advanced informational age, new media in/beyond the Internet of Things (IoT) regime of social reciprocities transform not just both the form and substances of knowledge exchanges but also expanding new learning opportunities across spaces and time. The new e-learning and e-sharing experience are in/beyond different linguistic-cum-visual and cultural spaces; like the Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Hence, socio-economic activities at a global scale are 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. More specific, 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 and with Lingua Franca in 21st Century information age, ICT-driven linguistic world transformations are more than obvious with inter-and-cross-linguistic mainstreaming. Juxtaposing the once 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. Critically examining policy issues on (new) language for e-learning and cross-cultural communication in/beyond cyberspace, this paper highlights the challenges for, and contradictions embedded in, multilingualism in a globalizing world. It discusses new phenomenal (e-)learning of new languages; as cyber-linkages are revolutionary in changing socio-cultural interactions, global-locally, behavioural repertoires among people in different geographical regions and time zones. The most important one arguably is the enabling of multilingual, cross-and-inter-cultural communication – hence learning from, with a discovery of, new experiences.

Keywords: e-learning, information society, multiculturalism, new media;