Global Perspectives on Project-Based Language Learning, Teaching, and Assessment Key Approaches, Technology Tools, and Frameworks

134  Melinda Dooly and Dolors Masats

trans: cool
23. TR: immediately ((writing stop on board)) (1.11)
ha/ now we can see different paintings\ (0.34)
((points to four paintings that Snoopy is now
standing in front of)) here/((makes the sound
of a bell ringing; points to the painting on the
left in the virtual art gallery)) do you remember
this painting? (1.01) ((points to a painting of
Trafalgar Square by Abelló))
24. RO: que es el trafalgo
trans: why it’s Trafalgar (square)

Students are sitting in a circle in front of the classroom screen when
the teacher names a volunteer, Marcel, to repeat a command she models
(turn 18: tell SNOOPY go: left). Marcel stands up and repeats the com-
mand (turn 19). At this point, the researcher, who is sitting at the back
of the room with a computer, moves the left arrow in her computer and
the avatar, Snoopy, sets in motion and turns to the left. The teacher pre-
tends to be surprised (turn 20), stays silent for a few seconds in which
she observes the students’ reactions and then models a new instruction
(turn 21) to indicate to the children how they should instruct Snoopy to
stop moving.

The role of technology in this extract is crucial as it provides a rich
space for learning: an environment of authentic input in which learners
have the opportunity of first inferring the meaning of the commands used
in English (stop, go left) and then to reproduce these lexical items to give
directions to another being (the avatar). In this short extract of data,
the learners are provided with opportunities to notice a target form (the
teacher explains: ‘tell Snoopy go left’; ‘stop is a very important word’) and
to focus on meaning, through discovery-oriented tasks (Nunan, 2003).
They also experience authentic use of the target language as they see that
their commands have what one might call a communicative impact. They
tell Snoopy to move and the avatar performs the children’s commands.

Of course, it is recognized that defining ‘authentic’ can be problematic.
In her review on authenticity in language teaching and learning, Gilmore
(2007) stated that “the concept of authenticity can be situated either
in the text itself, in the participants, in the social or cultural situation
and purposes of the communicative act, or some combination of these”
(p. 98). It can be argued that virtual worlds are not authentic and that the
students were not actually interacting with anyone outside the classroom
(the researcher was manipulating the avatar). However, we argue that
the technology provided the possibility for the students to interact with
another sentient being in an authentic and purposeful manner because it

‘What Do You Zinc About the Project?’ 135
made sense to them to do so. The young learners were thrilled, as verbal-
ized by ST1 turn 22, who exclaims ‘cool!’ when he realizes that Snoopy
is reacting to their words. The students are engaged in an interaction
with the technology that allows them to see that their words in the target
language trigger a reaction from another.

Focusing on Form With TEPBLL
As previously mentioned in this text, socio-constructivist views are the
basis of our understanding of what takes place during language learning.
Language learning is a situated social practice (Masats, Nussbaum,  &
Unamuno, 2007) because

learning takes place through the course of interaction, not only
because learners generate language input and output, but also
because the fact of using a language code they have not yet mastered
forces them to reflect upon language form and use to maintain the
flow of their conversation.

(Masats & Unamuno, 2001, p. 240)
The fact that any sequence of TEPBLL tasks can be embedded in a real-
life situation in which learners feel the need to communicate with oth-
ers in the target language of the project forces them to focus on how to
maintain the flow of their conversation and helps them become aware of
the importance of accuracy in the messages they convey. This is especially
relevant in asynchronous communication where their interlocutor is dis-
tanced both geographically and temporally (Vinagre & Muñoz, 2011).
Technology-enhanced asynchronous computer-mediated communication
can afford more opportunities for noticing as the production of language
can be planned, practiced, reviewed, and revised until the interlocutor
is satisfied with the message content (Hirotani & Lyddon, 2013). In the
case presented next, the context is both asynchronous (three boys are pre-
paring a message for their Swedish partners) and synchronous (face-to-
face discussion with the teacher and peers), thus providing opportunities,
from a Vygotskyan sociocultural point of view, for corrective feedback
(collaborative dialogue) that is embedded within the learning space.

In the next extract, taken from data collected during the How to Make
a Difference project, three adolescent students (Marcus, Jaime, and
Antoni) are recording a short voice message addressed to their Swedish
partners, using a smartphone as the recording device.

Extract 3. How to Make a Difference: Marcus Repairs Jaime’s Dis-
course for the First Time.

Participants: MA (Marcus), JA (Jaime), AN (Antoni), SA (Sabrina:
researcher/teacher)

136  Melinda Dooly and Dolors Masats

Notes: ((students are recording their message into the
smartphone))
71. MA: this is Marcus\
(0.17)
72. JA: hi: this is Jaime\
73. AN: hi\ this is Antoni\
74. JA: what do you zinc ((mispronounces ‘think)) about
the project/
75. MA: what do you learn about: Syrian refugees/
76. AN: =how many hours do you have to learn in your
school/
77. JA: =what weather like: (.) in Sweden/
(0.41)
78. MA: we like the project and we are pleased ((pronounced
please -ed)) to work with you\
Notes: ((boys stand very ‘regimentally’ during the
recitation))
79. MA: thanks and bye bye\
80. JA: [#bye#]
81. AN: [bye bye]
82. JA: [bye::]
Notes: ((all wave))
Notes: ((Marcus stops the recording))
(1.0)
83. SA: guys: (.) you should smile a little bit\ (.) you are so
serious\
Notes: ((the boys look at her))
Notes: ((Marcus pokes Jaime; takes his arm))
84. MA: no\ (.) has de dir (.) the >weather< ((pronounces the
word carefully and slowly))
Trans you have to say
85. AN: hee hee
86. JA: ((smiles, looks away, seems slightly embarrassed))
87. MA: [what’s the weather]
88. SA: [let’s- let’s watch it\ let’s watch it\]
89. MA: #what’s the weather like#\
Notes: ((Marcus reaches down to the smartphone as he
repeats Jaime’s sentence))

As we can see in Extract 3, one of the boys, Jaime, has problems pro-
nouncing the verb “think” (turn 75), and in asking about the weather
in English (turn 74), although the boys continue recording. When the
three of them finish reciting their parts, Marcus switches off the cell phone
recorder. The teacher, in an attempt to get the boys to relax, tells them to

‘What Do You Zinc About the Project?’ 137
‘smile a bit’ (turn 83). However, rather than acknowledging the ‘adult
expert,’ Marcus addresses Jaime to repair his discourse by first making
him notice the target word form (you have to say ‘weather,’ turn 84) and
producing the whole sentence (turn 95) as a language model (turns 87 and
89). Jaime seems embarrassed (turn 86) so the teacher suggests that they
could play their recording and check (turn 88). Marcus picks up the phone
while repeating the corrected sentence (turn 89). In this example of ‘col-
laborative negotiation’ of repair, the fact that Jaime has mispronounced
‘think’ is not noticed by anyone in the group. Instead, Marcus, taking the
role of ‘language expert’ (Masats, 2008, 2017), explicitly directs Jaime’s
focus on the pronunciation and correct use of the word ‘weather.’

In the next extract, the boys have decided to repeat the recording, insti-
gated by Marcus, who tells the teacher to record again in a previous turn
not shown here.

Extract 4. How to Make a Difference: Marcus Repairs Jaime’s Dis-
course for the Second Time.

Participants: MA (Marcus), JA (Jaime), AN (Antoni), SA (Sabrina)

104. SA: Jaime\ (.) can you tell me your part\ only your
part?
Notes: ((Marcus has his hand on Jaime’s arm; takes it off))
Notes: ((Antoni hops forward towards the smartphone))
105. JA: eh:::
106. MA: la segunda
Trans: the second one
107. JA: °si si si°
Trans: yeah yeah yeah
108. JA: ((looks down at the floor as if thinking))
109. AN: ((looks up from the smartphone; signals to
Marcus with his arm as if to show him
something))
110. JA: what the weather like (.) in Sweden\
111. MA: =WHAT’S the weather #like#
112. JA: °what the weath-°
113. SA: come\ (.) what’s the weather like in Sweden\
Notes: ((Marcus leans over to look at whatever Antoni is
doing with the smartphone. both boys giggle.))
114. SA: you are saying it very fast\ (.) ok/
115. SA: ok\ (.) just <slowly>\
Notes: ((Marcus has a puzzled look on his face))
116. JA: What’s the weather like/ (.) in Sweden\
((pronounces it better))
117. SA: =perfect\
118. SA: thank you\

138  Melinda Dooly and Dolors Masats
Before recording, the teacher prompts Jaime to practice his sentence

off record. Jaime appears to feel doubtful (eh::: turn 105) when he is
addressed by the teacher, and Marcus intervenes again immediately (turn
106 ‘the second one’) to clarify which part of his message he needs to say
again. Jaime indicates he had understood the teacher (turn 107, ‘yeah,
yeah, yeah’) although he takes some time to answer, but when he does so,
he still is not able to produce an accurate rendition of the target sentence
(turn 110), which triggers a new repair by Marcus (turn 111). Marcus
explicitly draws Jaime’s attention to the form and use of the word, raising
his tone of voice to mark the need to use a verb [is: WHAT’S] after the
interrogative pronoun. Jaime whispers his new attempt to produce the
sentence correctly and as he fails (turn 112), the teacher intervenes to calm
him down and model the target form herself (turn 113) with an embed-
ded correction (providing him with the excuse that he was speaking too
fast; turn 114) and prompts Jaime to say his line again (turn 115). Marcus
appears to be surprised with the teacher’s intervention but Jaime is finally
able to produce his sentence correctly (turn 116) followed by positive rein-
forcement from the teacher (turn 117). However, Marcus is still dissatis-
fied with the output and they eventually record a third time (Extract 5).

Extract 5. How to Make a Difference: Marcus Is Still Not Happy With
Jaime’s Performance.

Participants: MA (Marcus), JA (Jaime), AN (Antoni), SA (Sabrina),
VRD (voice recording device

125. JA: what do you zink about project?
126. MA: what do you learn about >Syrian refugees<?
127. AN: how many hours do you have to learn in your
school?
128. JA: weather- (.) ((slight smile)) what’s the weather like
in Sweden?
129. MA: we like the project\ and we are pleased
((pronounced please -ed)) to work with you\
thanks: (.) and bye bye\ ((starts to wave at
smartphone))
Notes: ((all of them wave at smartphone))
130. AN: [bye bye::]
131. JA: [bye bye]
Notes: ((Marcus reaches down and turns off recorder
app))
132. SA: shall we watch it? or send it?
Notes: ((Marcus clicks button on smartphone))
133. MA: #uhm# (.) #wait a-#
134. VRD: hi\ this is Marcus\ (.) hi\ this is Jaime\
Notes: ((Jaime turns his back and sneezes into his sleeve))

‘What Do You Zinc About the Project?’ 139

135. VRD: (.) hi\ this is Antoni\ (.) what do you zink about
project? (.)
136. VRD: what do you learn about >Syrian refugees>? (.)
Notes: ((the boys are staring at the smartphone the whole
time))
137. VRD (.) how many hours do you have\ to learn in your
school?
Notes ((Marcus looks at Antoni, slaps his forehead and
begins to laugh. Antoni leans back and smiles.
Jaime looks at Marcus and smiles))
138. VRD: (.) weather- what’s the weather like\ in Sweden?
Notes: ((Marcus begins to make circular motion with his
hands. rubs his head and smiles))
139 MA: again\ ((continues making circular motions with
hands, smiles))

Jaime has a false start with the problematic lexical form, but is able
to self-correct his discourse and produce his line correctly (turn 128).
When they finish, the teacher asks them whether they want to listen to
their message (although she uses the word ‘watch,’ it is an audio for-
mat only) or send it on to their Swedish partners (turn 132). Marcus is
impatient to play their recording again (notes) and immediately initi-
ates the listening activity. The three boys stare at the smartphone and
listen attentively to their clip (starting at 134), while Marcus smiles and
slaps Antoni’s forehead (notes 137) perhaps to signal his disapproval
of Antoni’s line they had just heard; Jaime appears to be complicit with
this interaction. However, when Marcus hears Jaime’s utterance he
reaches for the phone and indicates with both gestures of hands in cir-
cular motion and verbally (‘again’ turn 139) that he wants to record the
presentation once more.

As we have seen, Marcus is the only member of the triad outwardly
worried about the accuracy of their joint production. However, neither
Antonio nor Jaime protest about repeating the recording several times,
arguably indicating that producing an accurate message is equally as
important for them. Extracts 3, 4, and 5 illustrate the potential of tech-
nologies to monitor students’ discourse, focus their attention on the form
of their messages, and help them to collaborate to produce an acceptable
product for the targeted (external) audience.

Concluding Remarks
Thirty years ago, Warschauer (1997) argued that technology can serve as a
‘cognitive amplifier’ to promote both interaction and focus on form through
reflection on input and output. Similarly, Ortega (1997) proposed that the

140  Melinda Dooly and Dolors Masats
typology of the technology-enhanced task can have an impact on how focus
on form is enacted. Research into technology-enhanced task-based language
teaching and learning has advanced over the years, providing evidence that
both authors’ arguments hold weight. In the project with the young language
learners discussed here, the first technology-enhanced task (matching game,
Extract 1) triggered focus on form on single lexical items, negotiated between
teacher and learner, whereas the last task (guiding an avatar through the
virtual art gallery, Extract 2) triggered a higher amount of language produc-
tion as well as focus on form. The avatar contributed to a learning space
in which the participants adjusted their language forms and interactional
patterns in accordance to the features of the task. The teacher used verbal
instructions—directed towards the avatar—to elicit noticing and to get the
learners to attend to linguistic elements (DeKeyser, Doughty, & Williams,
1998) while at the same time using the learning space to promote ‘meaning-
focused’ interactions (Willis & Willis, 2007).

In Extracts 3, 4, and 5, project-based language learning—coupled with
technology—provided the pre-adolescents with ample opportunities to
focus on both form and meaning. In this particular learning space the
technology (the recording device) helped the teacher get the three boys to
focus on form. Of particular interest is the way in which the boys initi-
ated repetitive practice of the target language—a much sought after aim
of any language class. Moreover, the telecollaborative nature of the task
provided an authentic audience in the form of Swedish partners, thus
ensuring that the target language use was meaningful for them.

According to Lee, “collaborative dialogue centers on how learners
assist one another in reconstructing linguistic forms rather than engag-
ing in negotiation of meaning caused by a communication breakdown”
(2008, p. 54). TEPBLL appears to support collaborative dialogue quite
effectively. As illustrated through these extracts, the technology-enhanced
activities in the projects ensure an authentic need for using the target lan-
guage. They also provide ample opportunities for moments of noticing,
reflecting, and repairing target forms through interaction and collabora-
tion with teachers, classmates, and fellow language learners outside of the
immediate environment of the language classroom. More importantly,
TEPBLL is possible with all learners—from very young, early beginner
language learners to more advanced language users. TEPBLL engages the
learners in exciting news ways to experiment, play, and explore the target
language. As Marcus demonstrates, it seems that this approach encour-
ages learners to use the language again and again and again.

Notes

1. IRF: Initiation-response-feedback. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) first dis-
cussed this widely acknowledged model of spoken language in the classroom,
arguing that the language of the classroom differs from other forms of spoken
discourse; it is mostly formally structured and controlled by one dominant
party (usually the teacher).

‘What Do You Zinc About the Project?’ 141

2. Virtual art gallery created by Dr. Randall Sadler, University of Illinois Urbana
Champaign, as part of the design of the project.

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Walsh, S. (2011) Exploring classroom discourse: Language in action, London:
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Acknowledgements

The data presented here were possible thanks to funding by the Span-
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Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Técnica
de Excelencia, Grant number: EDU2013–43932-P); 2013–2017 (grant
extended to March 2018); and Obra Social “la Caixa,” Grant number:
2016ACUP-001 (2017–2020).

Appendix

/ intonation goes up
\ intonation goes down
? utterance delivered as a clear question
(.) short pause (less than a tenth of a second)
text- truncated word
text language other than English
trans: translation of text
TEXT louder than normal
°text° softer than normal
(number) exact time of pause longer than a tenth of a second
text: elongation of a syllable, approximately 1/10 of a second
[text]
[text] per symbol
=text overlap
#text# latching words
>text< laughter in voice
slowly

8 Bridging Cross-Cultural
Teaching Practices With
Technology-Enriched PBLL
in Chinese as a Foreign
Language Education

Juanjuan Zhao

Introduction

There has been an increasing number of international and immigrant
teachers working in U.S. schools with the frequent exchange, visiting,
and migration of human resources cross-culturally in the context of glo-
balization in education (Zhao, 2016). The field of Chinese as a foreign
language (CFL) education, in particular, has witnessed a fast growth in
the number of teachers with foreign educational backgrounds in Ameri-
can schools in the last decade with the perceived growing importance
of People’s Republic of China as a global economic and political power
(Beckett & Zhao, 2016, 2018). The rapid development of Chinese pro-
grams has resulted in a great demand for Chinese language teachers.
Schools in the U.S. have been trying to recruit teachers from China due
to a shortage of qualified and certified teachers in the field (Wang, 2007;
Xu, 2012). According to The College Board (2016), more than 1,000
Chinese guest teachers have been placed in American K–12 schools since
2007. In addition, educated native speakers of Chinese who reside in the
United States have constituted another important teacher source (Asia
Society, 2010).

The existing literature on cross-cultural teaching has identified various
challenges faced by immigrant and international teachers in the areas
of pedagogy, lesson planning, classroom management, and relationships
with students (Zhao, 2016). Teachers educated in foreign cultures “are
faced with the daunting realization that teaching in U.S. schools is tre-
mendously different from their own schooling experiences” (Haley  &
Ferro, 2011, p.  290). Pedagogical differences and knowledge are two
of the most frequently discussed factors that hinder effective teaching
for international and immigrant teachers within the U.S. school system,
especially for beginning teachers who may find it hard to recognize the
“cultural and social nuances with which they are unfamiliar” (Haley &
Ferro, 2011, p.  303). In the absence of sufficient knowledge of educa-
tional practices and connection to the culture of education in the host

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 147
country, novice or immigrant teachers often tend to transfer their previ-
ous educational practices to the new contexts (Duff, 2008). This adds to
instructional tensions between teachers and students, as each holds dif-
ferent expectations of what teaching and learning should look like and of
the roles each of them are expected to play in the process (Zhao, 2016).

Classroom management and discipline are also reported as major
sources of difficulty for international and immigrant teachers, which
are oftentimes related to inadequate pedagogical knowledge. In Zhao
(2016), the direct transference of the Chinese model of education by the
teacher participants in the beginning phase of their teaching practices
led to objections and complaints by students, decreased student motiva-
tion and participation rates, and increased disruptive behaviors in the
classroom. These reactions exacerbated the frustrations experienced by
novice and international teachers. In an earlier classroom-based action
research project conducted on teaching and learning approaches of CFL
in U.S. classrooms (Zhao, 2015), it was found that students’ decreased
learning interests in the Chinese course and their frequent disruptive
behaviors in the classroom had to do with the teacher’s adherence to a
teaching approach that relied heavily on exercises and textual learning.

Project-based learning (PBL) in general has been heralded as a use-
ful approach for helping teachers with foreign educational backgrounds
overcome pedagogical challenges, deal with cultural differences in Amer-
ican and foreign educational systems, and adjust to American educa-
tion culture (Case, 2006; Zhao, 2015, 2016). Case (2006), for instance,
documented the teaching experiences of one science teacher of newcom-
ers and studied how PBL functioned successfully as a conduit for the
teacher to adapt to curriculum planning that was based on students’
interests and needs. PBL has also been found to be helpful for novice
teachers managing classroom discipline and improving teacher-student
relationships. In a classroom-based action research project on teach-
ing CFL in a U.S. high school, Zhao and Beckett (2014) described how
technology-enriched PBLL was applied as an intervention to improve
students’ engagement, cultural knowledge, and communicative skills in
Chinese. The teacher participant in that study had noted less engage-
ment in learning activities from the students and more disruptive behav-
iors at the end of the first semester, as the students were bored with the
traditional class format that heavily emphasized exercises and textual
memorization. Student interviews, surveys, project products, classroom
observation, and teacher journals revealed that PBLL was efficient in
helping the teaching and learning of the language, engaging and motivat-
ing students in learning, enhancing cultural knowledge, and improving
students’ language skills. As students’ engagement in learning increased,
the teacher also found an improved relationship with students through
collaboration and the change from her authoritative role to a facilitator
of students learning.

148  Juanjuan Zhao
The literature on PBLL in second and foreign language educa-

tion, in particular English language education, has been growing. For
example, the most commonly heralded values are the authenticity of
students’ experiences and the language they are exposed to and use
through project work. Through PBLL, students are arguably better
able to learn and use language functionally, which helps improve all
four language skills (Stoller, 2006). However, the efficacy of integrating
PBLL in the existing body of literature has focused largely on students
and their learning achievement (e.g., Allen, 2004; Lee, 2002; Wu  &
Meng, 2010), whereas less attention has been paid to teachers’ peda-
gogical knowledge and professional growth with regard to PBLL. As
a key aspect of teachers’ professional competencies, teachers’ knowl-
edge, and in particular their pedagogical knowledge, has a direct effect
on instructional quality, which is an important factor in determining
gains in student achievement (Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). This makes
the research on the development and dynamics of teachers’ pedagogical
knowledge an essentially important area of study, especially when it
comes to cross-cultural teaching in the context of globalization, where
frequent exchanges and migration of human resources are becoming
the norm (Zhao, 2016). As teachers’ pedagogical decisions hinge on
the quality of their pedagogical knowledge (Guerriero, 2017), inad-
equate knowledge, as noted earlier, can create instructional tensions
and challenges for international and immigrant teachers transitioning
into American school settings. The knowledge of teachers changes with
their teaching practice, but teachers’ initial education, communities of
practice, networks, and other work-related experiences all contribute
to the development of their pedagogical knowledge (Siemens, 2005).
In addition, cultural and educational traditions and personal educa-
tional experience have been found to be influential in shaping teachers’
instructional beliefs and pedagogical choices (Zhao, 2016). Nonethe-
less, teachers are social agents and learning specialists who constantly
update and change their repertoire of knowledge, and engage in con-
tinuous transformations of their teaching beliefs and practice through
experience and learning to adapt to new teaching environments and
demands (Guerriero, 2017; Zhao, 2016).

Thus, one of the goals of this study was to look at how teachers adopt
PBLL in their cross-cultural teaching practice and how their perceptions
and practice with regard to PBLL develop and change in their teach-
ing. The findings contribute to the limited research on language teachers’
pedagogical development and professional growth with regard to PBLL
in a cross-cultural setting. In addition, this study addresses a knowledge
gap in under-researched literature on PBLL in CFL education. Studies in
this area to date are scarce, especially technology-enriched PBLL (Zhao,
2015), yet these studies are essential as they can benefit practitioners in

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 149
their teaching practice and help to “sustain the growth and ensure the
quality of Chinese language instruction and learning” in general (Wang,
2012, p. 37).

This study looks at the teaching practices and experiences of CFL
teachers with the learning and use of PBLL enriched with technology
in their classrooms. Specifically, it intends to explore (1) the roles that
PBLL play in their initial adaptation to American educational system,
and (2) how teachers use and perceive PBLL in their cross-cultural teach-
ing practices.

Research Method
An ethnographic design was adopted for the study because of its empha-
sis on cultural understandings and authentic settings of the phenomenon
being studied. A key assumption for an ethnography is that by entering
directly into and interacting with the lives of the people being studied,
one reaches a better and more comprehensive understanding of the beliefs
and behaviors of those individuals (Mertens, 2005). This approach thus
gives educational researchers a perspective to deeply examine teacher
practitioners’ experiences in their natural contexts along with the knowl-
edge obtained from the teachers’ own perceptions of their teaching expe-
riences (Zhao, 2016).

This chapter is part of a dissertation study that examined the expe-
riences of CFL teachers in American secondary schools. This chapter
focuses specifically on four native Chinese speakers who teach in high
schools in an American midwestern city in the study (see Table  8.1).
These four teachers were observed teaching from September  2013 to
April 2014. Classroom observation involved video recordings and was
conducted on a weekly basis that spanned the academic year for up to 22
weeks depending on the school schedule and the availability of teachers
(see Table  8.2 for details). Data sources also included interviews, cas-
ual conversations with the teacher participants, artifact collection, and
field notes from class observations and interviews with the teachers. The
interview format was one-to-one and semi-structured (Creswell, 2005).
Interviews were conducted at the beginning of the observation. Casual
conversations were related to instructional methods, activities, the lesson
design, and classroom management, and were carried out throughout the
length of the observation.

The interviews, classroom observation, and casual conversations
were fully transcribed, and data were first analyzed inductively
through open coding and domain analysis (Spradley, 1980) to iden-
tify themes and patterns for each teacher. A  cross-case analysis was
then performed during which codes derived from the first stage were
compared systematically across all four teacher informants to identify

Table 8.1  Participants’ demographic information

Teachers* Years of Age Numbers of Grade Number of Job Types School Recent Previous
Teaching in Range Classes & levels students Types degrees Occupation
the US Levels

Linda 13 46–50 2; 2 9–12 17 Part Time Private BA in law, Law student,
Nancy 6 41–45 5; 5 7–12 >100 Full Time Public Taiwan Taiwan
Queen 4 51–55 3; 2 10–11 Full Time Public
Wendy 6 31–35 2; 2 9–11 50 Part Time Private MA in ed., US Math teacher, US
30 MA in ed., US University
MA in music
librarian, China
ed., China College instructor,

China

Note. These are the pseudonyms given to the teacher participants. Linda and Wendy worked at the same institute during the time of the observation.

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 151
Table 8.2  Observation information

Teachers Observation Number of Number Class Cultural Hours
duration visits of classes period events observed
observed (hours) (times)

Linda 04.03.2014– 5 2 10 10
Nancy 05.08.2014 19
Queen 22 3 1 3** 50
Wendy 10.10.2013–
04.24.2014 5 4* 1.5 1*** 67

09.19.2013– 2 10 10
04.08.2014

04.03.2014–
06.02.2014

Note. This table only displays observation information for video recorded classroom
instruction and cultural events. Time for casual conversations was not included.
* Two levels of classes in fall and another two different classes and levels in winter and

spring quarters.
** One field trip to art museum and two Chinese club events
*** Chinese New Year celebration

and understand any similarities or variations in the experiences and
teaching practices of the Chinese teachers.

Findings and Discussion
PBLL as an Instructional Bridge
Just as with other international/immigrant teachers described in the
existing literature (Duff, 2008; Haley & Ferro, 2011; Zhao, 2016), the
teacher participants in this study also tended to transfer their previous
educational practices into their current teaching, especially in their early
careers in American classrooms, and thus they experienced pedagogical
conflicts with American education and culture. Recalling the experience
in their interviews, the teacher participants all admitted that their teach-
ing approaches were more teacher-centered in the beginning, and that
they created fewer activities and provided less time for students to prac-
tice the language in class. The structuring of the classes that focused on
lectures oftentimes bored students who then began losing interest and
motivation for learning. Some became resistant to instruction and caused
behavioral problems, as experienced by the teacher researcher in Zhao
and Beckett (2014). These conflicts and challenges posed to the teachers
helped them reflect on their teaching beliefs and approaches in terms of
the differences between Chinese and American education systems, and
acted as a trigger for change to their instructional approaches. All four
teacher participants described their experiences teaching in U.S. class-
rooms as an adaptation and learning process aimed at becoming more

152  Juanjuan Zhao
student-centered, and PBLL became one of the first approaches (along
with games and classroom activities) that these teachers used to adjust
their teaching practice.

Cross-cultural teaching involves daily encounters with differences and
conflicts, which requires reflections, consciousness-raising, and constant
negotiations with teaching beliefs and practices (Beckett & Zhao, 2016).
The challenges that these teachers initially encountered, in the absence
of sufficient understanding of American education or of the differences
between Chinese and American education systems, induced reflection on
and action to change of their instructional approaches. PBLL, as one of
the first approaches that the teachers learned and adopted in their adap-
tation to American education, functioned successfully as a conduit for
change. According to the teachers, part of their adjustment to American
education included designing curricula that were based more on students’
interests and needs, attempting to increase students’ engagement and
enjoyment in learning, and providing opportunities for students to learn
and use the target language during project activities rather than “cram-
ming” knowledge to students using lectures. As such, PBLL served as an
instructional bridge for the teachers transitioning from the Chinese ways
of teaching to an American pedagogy. The conduit-for-change function
of PBL was also observed by Case (2006) in his case study on a novice
science teacher in American classroom where PBL was found to help
the teacher move from a teacher-centered approach to a constructionist
pedagogy.

One reason PBLL was chosen, as stated by the teachers, was because
it is “learning by doing,” which they believed was exactly what Amer-
ican education advocated. The second reason for adopting PBLL was
because it is a pragmatic approach to language teaching that emphasizes
the development of students’ communicative competence, which is what
these teachers were attempting to adjust to from a grammar translation
approach to language teaching and learning. For instance, both Queen
and Wendy said that they initially had the same expectations towards
their students as teachers in the Chinese culture would by setting high
academic standards, concentrating on the teaching of grammar and
vocabulary, and delivering what they believed to be important informa-
tion to students. Later they learned that as foreign language instructors,
they could help students speak and use the language for communication,
rather than focusing merely on training students for tests of content and
skills, and thus they attempted to adopt PBLL.

The third reason for adopting PBLL in CFL classrooms, as noted
by both Nancy and Wendy, was the emphasis on acknowledging and
developing individual learning abilities. Wendy said that she understood
through her past experience that the style of teaching that required stu-
dents to “cram” knowledge would not work with her American students,
so she employed PBLL for her Level 2 students who possessed the higher

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 153
language proficiency needed to research and present their project work
in Chinese.

Another motive behind the implementation of PBLL for these teach-
ers was the need to increase students’ interest and engagement. A tech-
nology-infused PBLL approach was adopted because, according to the
teachers, technology appealed to the students, who were proficient
users. Among the four teachers, Queen was deeply reflective about her
teaching practice in her first job where she found herself disappointed,
frustrated with student misbehavior, and what she described as a bro-
ken teacher-student relationship. She revealed in several conversations
that, as a novice teacher, the frustration was mostly caused by the differ-
ences and conflicts between American and Chinese educational cultures
that she was not fully aware of. Realizing the mistake that she made in
directly transferring the Chinese ways of teaching in her first job, she
became cautious and observant about her current teaching practice. In
a conversation following a class project, Queen said that project work
was not what Chinese students and teachers, including herself, used to
do in China (as was the case with all the teachers: They had no previ-
ous experience with PBLL but learned it from attending conferences or
observing their colleagues’ instruction). However, Queen let students
do a project for every chapter because her students liked doing them
and through them she could find evidence of language learning. “As
long as they can learn, it is good,” as she put it. Queen’s case echoed
Zhao (2016), in which PBLL was adopted as an intervention to ease
tensions between the teacher and her student due to a direct transfer-
ence of the Chinese model of education (see Beckett & Zhao, 2016, for
details).

All teachers expressed a strong interest in and need to learn new teach-
ing methods, activity designs, and technology to meet students’ needs and
improve their teaching practice. Noting the importance of technology in
present-day education and the new learning characteristics of students in
the digital world, Linda said in the interview, “the younger generation,
unlike mine, liked learning with visuals,” and because of this she needed
to keep up with technology development. Likewise, Queen indicated
that technology developed rapidly and that her students were quicker
than she was in learning and mastering advanced technology: “We must
continuously study and learn about it,” she remarked in the interview.
This further suggests that teachers need to be lifetime learners who seek
to update their knowledge repertoire and improve their practice in an
attempt to adapt to the current educational contexts (Zhao, 2016). Infor-
mation about PBLL and the integration of technology into PBLL were
concepts that they learned early in their adaptation to American edu-
cation. For these teachers, the learning and adaptation of technology-
enriched PBLL served as an important step in helping them adjust to the
American school culture.

154  Juanjuan Zhao
The advantages of PBLL, as indicated by the teacher practitioners,

were consistent with the existing literature on PBL in ESL/EFL educa-
tion (e.g., Stoller, 2006; Wu & Meng, 2010). These advantages, together
with the appeal of technology to students, were the reasons that PBLL
infused with technology became a useful tool for the CFL teachers to use
in adjusting their teaching practice to a more student-centered approach.
In this sense, the advantages of PBLL infused with technology matched
the teachers’ understanding of American education, at least with some
of the outstanding characteristics of American education that differ from
those of the Chinese model of education (e.g., student-centeredness vs.
teacher-centeredness). The discussions about the implementation of
PBLL by the teachers suggested that as a pedagogical approach popular
in American education, PBLL was student-centered and fun, but it was
also educational. For example, Queen said that she found evidence of
students’ learning using PBLL, and Nancy referred to PBLL as “learning
through play.” Linda and Wendy looked at language development. PBLL
thus served to connect these teachers’ pedagogical beliefs that are rooted
in the Chinese education system (e.g., must find evidence of learning)
with the current American educational practices. This finding advances
previous studies (e.g., Case, 2006; Zhao, 2015, 2016) that touted PBLL
as an effective instructional approach in helping teachers with foreign
educational backgrounds overcome pedagogical challenges and adjust to
American education by further examining why and how PBLL was cho-
sen to enable the bridging of cross-cultural educational practices.

PBLL as a Tool for Cultural Instruction
A major component of PBLL implementation for these teachers was to
introduce Chinese culture and thus to increase students’ interest in and
engagement with the content, which is consistent with findings on PBLL
in English language education (e.g., Wu & Meng, 2010). Project topics
in the Chinese class covered both the historical and artistic heritage of
Chinese society and the modern culture (e.g., movies, songs, arts, and
literature), practices (e.g., ways of cooking and eating, and festival cel-
ebrations), and perspectives of Chinese societies (e.g., Confucian philoso-
phy, attitudes towards health, and family values). In Queen’s classes, for
instance, she sometimes assigned students a particular cultural topic to
explore and sometimes let the students choose their own topics of inter-
est. To her, teaching this way not only addressed the state foreign lan-
guage standards on cultural knowledge, but more importantly improved
students’ enjoyment and engagement in learning.

PBLL was an essential part of Nancy’s Chinese language curricula for
all three levels she taught at senior high, and her project assignments
were organized and well embedded in her lesson plans, perhaps due
to her years of experience and practice with PBLL. Similar to Queen’s

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 155
approach, grading rubrics that included requirements for specific aspects
of language were explained and given to students when the projects
were first assigned. However, unlike Queen’s, Nancy’s teaching of the
new lesson focused mainly on the teaching and learning of the language
needed for the project, including vocabulary, grammar, and sentences.
This language was first presented in PowerPoint slides through mostly
direct instruction where Nancy would explain the meanings of the words
and sentences, and the main ideas of texts, followed by homework (e.g.,
practice of character writing, word matching translation exercises).
These PBLL pre-tasks focused on language preparation that involved the
teacher identifying language that students perhaps needed for the project,
planning lessons around these areas of language, and having the students
practice the language (Brown, 2016). For the final products, students
either presented a product or communicated with each other in a particu-
lar scenario in Chinese. One example was a cooking contest project in
which students presented the cooking steps and shared the food with the
class. A second was a market day project in which students were assigned
to groups and brought their fruits/food to sell in class to replicate open
market activities. These types of projects helped students build their com-
municative competence in the target language. Their success offers evi-
dence for the claim that PBLL provides purposeful opportunities for both
language input and output, and the integration of both language forms
and meanings (Stoller, 2006).

The teachers and students regularly engaged in discussions about
cultural topics from the initial stage of project assignment to the final
product/presentation stage, promoting deeper inquiry into cross-cultural
ideologies. For example, in a lesson on reviewing fruit vocabulary for
the market day project in Nancy’s class, the teacher related the word
“apple” in Chinese to the word iPhone to help students better remem-
ber the word. Students then raised questions about whether people in
China ever used iPhones. Nancy explained that there were many brands
and choices for people to choose from in China: “Apple stores in China
are huge, usually of several floors and much bigger than what we have
here.” In a chapter on family, Queen assigned a project on introduc-
ing students’ family members in Chinese. After teaching the phrases and
expressions for introducing family members, she asked students to talk
about family and marriage traditions in the US and China, during which
students raised questions about the one-child policy and indicated unfair-
ness of treatment towards different genders. Upon hearing these com-
ments, Queen explained to students why such a policy was introduced
back in the 1970s and went on to tell the students not to trust the media
all the time: “All of the things on the media reported here in America are
not really saying the correct things about China.” She used an example
of a news report on “abandoning children” and said, “maybe it hap-
pens, but it is not the general case.” The discussions between students

156  Juanjuan Zhao
and the teachers during the project activities provided the teachers with
opportunities to clarify misunderstandings that the students might have
about China, and chances for students to pose questions and evaluate the
information they obtained elsewhere. Interactions such as these extended
students’ inquiry about Chinese culture, which confirmed Larmer and
Mergendoller’s (2015) argument about PBL’s function in fostering in-
depth inquiry.

PBLL for More Advanced Language Levels
Compared to Nancy’s and Queen’s frequent project assignments, Wendy
and Linda used PBLL less for cultural exploration and more for students’
language skill development. Linda, for example, often presented cultural
knowledge rather than letting her students explore it on their own. In one
Advanced Placement (AP) class, she talked through PowerPoint slides
for about 20 minutes, presenting to students various Chinese cultural
activities and covering topics from art through food to medicine (e.g.,
calligraphy, mahjong, Chinese knot, paper cutting, herbal medicine, and
Beijing Opera). She told the class that her presentation would help with
their short conversations in the AP test that she used as a guideline for
her curriculum design. One project Linda assigned in her AP class was to
find the names of Chinese ethnic minorities from the Internet. In a pro-
ject assignment observed in Wendy’s level 2 class, students were asked to
choose a Chinese cultural heritage or tradition, deliver a related product,
and show the class both the product and the procedures for making it.
For instance, one student researched on kites and kite-making in China,
and presented to the class a kite he made, explained the history of the
kite culture in China using PowerPoint Slides and videos, as well as the
procedures about how he made his kite. At the end of each presentation,
Wendy reinforced the language used by asking both the presenter and
audience questions in Chinese such as 风筝中文是什么？(What is kite in
Chinese?) and 兵马俑什么意思? (What does the word terra-cotta war-
riors mean?), and questions directed to the information from the pres-
entations (e.g., 她做这个脸谱用了多超时间？How long does it take for
her to make the mask?). Students were expected to answer in Chinese.
Beginning level students were not deemed proficient enough to deliver
the whole presentation in the target language, but they were expected
to present and teach their titles and key words in Chinese to their class-
mates, and to use the target language for the content they learned. Wen-
dy’s interactions with students around their project presentations created
opportunities for both language input and output, forms and meanings,
all critical for language development (Stoller, 2006).

Neither Wendy nor Linda appeared to have been fully aware of the
amount of learning and teaching that were taking place during project
activities. They explained that they did not think PBLL could work well

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 157
with students who had little background or training in the Chinese lan-
guage. They suggested that teachers should consider using the approach
only after building a foundation of basic language skills, indicating that
they believed that knowledge and language needed to be taught (input)
before students could exhibit creative output (Beckett  & Zhao, 2016),
suggesting that these teachers were interpreting PBLL as communica-
tive language practice only, not as an approach to language and con-
tent development. Linda further explained that she did not agree that
PBLL should be implemented for language teaching at all age levels. She
argued that because K–12 students typically had better memory skills
than adults, they should be assigned more textual study and memoriza-
tion tasks. This belief was consistent with her teaching practice, which
strongly emphasized students’ development of reading and writing skills,
and which advocated frequent practice in vocabulary recognition, read-
ing comprehension, and translation exercises in class, all typical of tradi-
tional language teaching (Zhao & Beckett, 2014). Because of this belief,
Linda listed phrases and expressions related to vocabulary and gave the
lists to the students to memorize, strongly suggesting that she believed
traditional teaching that is form- and input-focused may be more efficient
in meeting learning outcomes, a common perception of PBLL opponents.
Linda’s teaching practice and attitude also drew attention to the lack of
recognition of the value of PBLL, an issue discussed in Beckett and Slater
(2005), where English language learners, due to their different linguistic
and cultural beliefs, did not see the benefits of PBLL in helping them
develop language, content, and skills simultaneously.

Further illustrating Linda’s teaching philosophy, she said that there
was too much to teach in the courses and never enough time for stu-
dents to practice Chinese and to interact with her in class, not to men-
tion time for project activities. This view again reveals a potential lack
of recognition or understanding of the value of PBLL. When referring to
options for student-centered learning in American education, Linda said
that an over-emphasis on student autonomy and student-centered learn-
ing downplays the teacher’s expertise and skill: “Don’t you think it is a
waste of my talents? What can a three-year-old come up with? Why don’t
you let a 50-year-old tell you which direction you can go?” These state-
ments appear to suggest a distrust of student-led learning, potentially
downgrading students’ abilities and creativity in the process. Given that
Linda has been in the field of CFL for 13 years, she understands the value
and importance of constructivist practices in American education, but
she appears to struggle with how much control she can or should give to
her students. Such behavior resembles that of other international teach-
ers observed in previous studies (e.g., Dunn, 2011; Haley & Ferro, 2011)
who “are reluctant to accept pedagogical practices that detract from the
authority of the teacher” (Zhao, 2016, p. 23), which suggests a cultural
influence on their pedagogical beliefs and choices.

158  Juanjuan Zhao
The preference of a traditional language teaching approach and the

doubts and even biases towards PBLL draw our attention to the develop-
ment of teachers’ pedagogical beliefs. As Beckett (1999) noted, the rea-
sons are often complex, reflecting linguistic, cultural, and philosophical
beliefs held by teachers. In addition to cultural tradition, influence from
the Chinese model of education where schools stress imparting linguis-
tic and grammatical knowledge with the purpose of preparing students
for high test scores might be a factor that impacts such beliefs (Zhao,
2016). In Linda’s case, as she revealed in her interview, it may be that she
thought she could prove her teaching abilities to students’ parents and
her school through her attention to and expectation of students’ high test
scores on AP tests. Other factors that can account for the development
of teaching beliefs and pedagogical judgments and decisions are educa-
tion and work backgrounds, personalities, students’ abilities, and school
contexts. Apart from the various factors that may have contributed to
Linda’s and Wendy’s pedagogical beliefs and choices, however, is the pos-
sibility of inadequate teacher knowledge on PBLL and need for profes-
sional development. As noted earlier, all of the teachers had no previous
training with PBLL but learned it from attending conferences or observ-
ing their colleagues’ teaching. The depth of their knowledge about and
experiences with PBLL may be another potential aspect that limited them
from fully embracing the approach.

Tensions and Negotiations Around PBLL
The implementation of PBLL by the Chinese teachers in the class-
rooms often revealed tensions and negotiations that were manifested in
three dichotomies: between PBLL and the traditional Chinese teaching
approaches; between “having fun” and “real learning”; and between
teaching culture and language.

As previously noted, the tension and negotiation between PBLL and the
traditional teaching approach were demonstrated as a balance between
language output/practice and intensive language input opportunities.
One concern raised about PBLL as noted by Linda and Wendy was the
difficulty they felt the approach had for benefiting students with no prior
basic language skills. That is the reason Linda usually assigned her stu-
dents projects and tasks for preview or review of a lesson, that is, only as
supplementary tasks. She held the notion that PBL should not take over
direct instruction time because it could be very time-consuming com-
pared to traditional teaching approaches. As Nancy explained, “Within
a certain time frame, information acquired by students is limited in terms
of quantity and depth.” Thus, she felt it was more effective to combine
project work with the traditional teaching approach that emphasized
lectures, homework, and language exercises such as pattern drills, read-
ing comprehension, essay writing, and character writing practice to help

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 159
students master the language in their limited time during high school.
This was a viewpoint shared by all four teachers in the study and one that
was argued by Liang, Xie, and Gao (2020, Chapter 14) in their imple-
mentation of PBLL in English language education in China.

Another aspect of instructional tension was seen in the constant nego-
tiation between the teachers and students about how much time should
be spent between what Queen described as “fun” and “a serious matter.”
“Serious learning” indicated a learning attitude in contrast to the fun and
laughs that her students seemed to prefer but Queen and Linda felt dis-
tracted them from engaging in learning. This tension was reflected both
within PBLL itself (between the fun and learning components of PBLL)
and between PBLL and the traditional learning approaches. There were a
few times in Queen’s class, for instance, where she asked students to com-
plete project work on their own, but students wanted to work in teams
because they insisted it was more fun. Through negotiation, the teacher
and the students reached a compromise that the projects should stay as
individual work but students could sit in groups and discuss their topics.
PBLL was also considered by Linda to be more of a fun activity rather
than the “serious learning” of the more traditional Chinese way of teach-
ing, which counted as another factor for its supplementary role to tradi-
tional language teaching approaches. Similar doubts towards “learning
while playing” activities, with PBLL as one of the activities, were noted
by Chinese teachers in other studies (e.g., Rao, 1996). This suggests a
strong adherence to and belief in certain aspects of the Chinese model of
education, as observed in previous studies (e.g., Beckett & Zhao, 2016;
Zhao, 2016).

Linda expressed the same concern about PBLL being “fun not learn-
ing” when she reflected on the teaching of Chinese culture through the
approach. In providing suggestions for future teachers, she recommended
creating a flexible and interesting curriculum, but also advised teachers
not to spend too much time teaching culture and crafts (e.g., paper cuts,
calligraphy, and kites) just to pique student interests: “If you spend too
much time teaching culture, then it is only a class for fun. Students cannot
learn much about the language.” Similarly, Queen stated that although
the teaching of cultural knowledge was important, a language class should
have language development as its primary focus. She strongly disagreed
with her colleague’s teaching of mostly project-based Chinese culture. In
her own words, such classes should be taught as social studies classes, not
as language classes, and that a balance should be reached between teach-
ing language and culture while keeping students engaged and interested.
In the conflicts between language-focused and content-focused Chinese
teaching, these teachers again were seeking moderation by attempting to
reach a balance between the two, as observed by Zhao (2016).

Linda’s remarks again foreground this attitude of needing “seri-
ous learning” that was also observed in Queen’s interviews, but Linda

160  Juanjuan Zhao
showed more resistance to PBLL for cultural instruction (i.e., product-
oriented projects such as crafts). These perceptions of PBLL as offering
insufficient opportunities for serious learning, and the teachers’ strained
negotiations between PBLL and their traditional teaching approaches,
appeared to stem from their criticism of the entertainment aspect of pro-
ject activities, although their beliefs are not necessarily justified. While
these understandings of PBLL and the refrained use of it in CFL class-
rooms alert us to doubts about the comprehensiveness of the teachers’
knowledge about PBL and the development of such pedagogical beliefs,
the negotiation and struggles of the teachers to balance PBLL with the
Chinese ways of teaching should also draw our attention to the impact
that beliefs and prior practices have on the successful implementation of
PBLL. Above all, as Zhao (2016) argued, it was the goal of these teach-
ers’ to synthesize the different educational values and approaches drawn
from their own experiences in cross-cultural education, an exploration
which has broad implications for educational policy and practices.

Conclusion
This chapter looked at the experiences and classroom practices of CFL
teachers with technology-infused PBLL, and in particular at the roles that
PBLL played in the teachers’ transition to American classrooms as well as
the development and changes in these teachers’ perceptions and practice
of PBLL. Findings of this study suggest that PBLL infused with tech-
nology can function successfully as a bridge, helping teachers overcome
pedagogical conflicts and disciplinary challenges and adjust their teach-
ing approach from a teacher-centered model to a more student-centered
practice, especially in their early careers in American classrooms. The
advantages of PBLL were consistent with the existing literature on PBLL
in ESL/EFL classrooms in that PBLL helped the teachers design curricula
based on students’ interests and needs, increased students’ engagement
and enjoyment in learning, enhanced students’ cultural knowledge, and
provided them with opportunities to learn language form and meaning in
both their input and output during project activities. These advantages,
together with the student appeal for technology, were the reasons that
PBLL infused with technology became a handy tool for the CFL teach-
ers to use in their adaptation to American education. In addition to the
instructional bridge, the fun and educational features of PBLL connected
teachers’ beliefs about instruction and learning from the two cultures.
One belief is related to their education background in the Chinese culture
and the other is the constructivist teaching prevalent in the current Amer-
ican education system. This finding advances previous research findings
by demonstrating why and how PBLL was chosen and made possible
in bridging cross-cultural educational practices. The use of PBLL as a
tool for Chinese cultural instruction fulfills the requirements on cultural

Bridging Cross-Cultural Teaching Practices 161

teaching in foreign language education, and stimulates and sustains stu-
dents’ interest in the lessons, which helps ease the tension during the
teachers’ transition into American education.

Teachers’ knowledge is dynamic, as demonstrated in these teachers’
efforts at lifelong learning and their desires to improve their teaching prac-
tice by incorporating new methods and integrating technology in their
adaptation to American education. While the data revealed needs and
interests in learning to be more student-centered with PBLL, the concerns
and doubts the teachers raised about PBLL and its restricted use in their
classrooms suggest that the teachers, Linda and Wendy in particular, are
not fully embracing or trusting the PBLL concepts. The linguistic, cultural,
and philosophical traditions of the teachers (Beckett, 1999), as well as the
teachers’ personalities and school contexts, for instance, all contribute to
their pedagogical beliefs and judgments. The negativity about PBLL may
also indicate an inadequate knowledge of the approach and the lack of sup-
port and training, which calls for teacher educators and schools that have
the resources and abilities to offer courses or workshops on technology-
enriched PBLL. This can help all teachers develop a thorough understand-
ing of PBLL and thus be able to provide a better grounding to the decisions
they make in their classrooms. Such background knowledge requires
improvement in both the scope and depth of knowledge during initial
teacher education as well as throughout teachers’ professional careers.

However, care should be given in teacher training and professional
development programs to support teachers. The teachers’ effort in sup-
plementing and balancing PBLL with traditional teaching and learning
approaches reveals an intentional synthesis and integration of two edu-
cational practices. The hybridity of the classroom instruction and prac-
tices presented by the teacher participants in this study offers a unique
perspective to inform teacher-training programs which could help inter-
national or immigrant teachers create a flexible teaching repertoire that
includes both the skills of their own ethnic or cultural group and the
perhaps less familiar ones from the target culture, enabling teachers to
respond appropriately to various situations in their teaching practice.
Thus, a fuller understanding of PBLL and other teaching approaches is
highly needed to better guide the teachers in their blended teaching prac-
tice. More research that examines the adoption of PBLL in CFL educa-
tion and the issues that teachers face as they negotiate between their own
culturally informed methods of education and the use of PBLL in their
new contexts is strongly needed.

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Part III

Frameworks for
Technology-Mediated
PBLL



9 A Framework for Learning With
Digital Resources

Applications for Project-Based
Language Learning

J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski

Introduction
Project-based learning (PBL) is a learning-by-doing educational
approach that is rooted in the work of Dewey and oriented around stu-
dent engagement in sustained, collaborative, and authentic problem-
solving activity (Blumenfeld et. al, 1991). Proponents of the approach
argue that it aids students in building strong personal connections
with material and can therefore develop critical thinking skills and
lead to deeper learning of subject matter. Researchers and practitioners
who have applied or explored PBL within language-learning contexts
often report benefits both in motivation through personal engagement
and in language-related abilities through meaningful language use in
task-related activity (Stoller, 2006). While it has been noted that lan-
guage learners in PBL contexts sometimes express frustration with the
reduced emphasis on formal aspects of language (e.g., Beckett, 1999),
the meaningful, goal-oriented language use that drives successful PBL
activity places a greater emphasis on the meaning potential of linguis-
tic features by using language to drive activity rather than focusing on
language itself.

Project-based language learning (PBLL) advocates recognize the poten-
tial for technology to enhance PBLL by offering learners opportunities
for project-based research, interaction for collaborative work, and more
authentic contact with the target environment (Krajcik, Blumenfeld,
Marx, & Soloway, 1994). However, while PBLL and the use of digital
resources are increasingly common in language education, little is known
regarding the ways that learners interact with digital resources and tech-
nologies in PBLL contexts. Language educators therefore have little guid-
ance to inform decisions regarding PBLL course and digital materials
development or how to prepare learners for learning in such an environ-
ment. The Framework for Learning with Digital Resources responds to
this gap by providing a profile of effective language-learning behaviors
and strategies that successful learners deploy when learning with digital
resources in PBLL.

168  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski

Motivation for the Framework for Learning
With Digital Resources

In spite of the potential benefits of technology-infused PBLL contexts,
developing customized digital learning materials for complex PBLL envi-
ronments must be undertaken with care. PBLL environments and digital
learning resources themselves may not match language learners’ expecta-
tions for the educational activity that is in many cases oriented around
print-based learning materials and formal (i.e., grammatical) dimensions
of language. Broadly speaking, the understanding that learners’ life-long
educational experiences serve as a frame for future learning activity has
led to calls for explorations into “how the conventions of readings shift
when students interact with digital texts” (Evans  & Po, 2007, p.  70).
In some cases, the expectations of scholars and educators do not match
the experiences and preferences of language learners. For example, while
scholars note possible ways that digital textbooks may support learn-
ing (e.g., Gu, Wu, & Yu, 2015), learner experiences with such resources
have not always been found to be particularly positive (e.g., Lam, Lam,
Lam, & McNaught, 2009).

Perhaps this gap between the expectations of educators and the experi-
ences of learners is partly due to the way that learning with complex digi-
tal resources is conceptualized. From a sociocultural perspective, human
activities are both mediated by and oriented around cultural artifacts.
Thorne’s (2003, 2016) cultures-of-use conceptual framework examines
how technological artifacts mediate language-learning activity, highlight-
ing that past learning experiences frame current learning experiences.
Technology-infused PBLL may place learners in unfamiliar learning expe-
riences with unfamiliar artifacts, and there is limited research on learning
behaviors in such contexts with such technology. Thorne’s cultures-of-
use framework foregrounds that digital artifacts are embedded within
the learning activity that they mediate, thus highlighting the need for
reasoned selection and design of digital learning materials.

This need to understand learning in these spaces resulted in the Frame-
work for Learning with Digital Resources, which represents a profile of
successful learning/reading behaviors with complex digital resources that
students develop over time. Using Hubbard’s (2004) learner-training-
based distinction between operational and learning competence, it con-
ceptualizes learning behaviors and strategies in a digital environment in
three categories: recognizing features (operational competence), monitor-
ing learning (learning competence), and making connections (learning
competence). It may be used as a basis for further research into digital
learning strategies or to inform pedagogy and materials development.
Such a framework is particularly useful for the PBLL context, given
that this pedagogical approach can be more cognitively demanding for
learners.

Learning With Digital Resources 169
Thorne’s (2003, 2016) cultures-of-use conceptual framework, itself
rooted in cultural-historical traditions, provides a backdrop for our
framework by providing a means to “render artifacts as they exist for
users” (2003, p. 40). Thorne highlights that through “routinized” (2003,
p. 40), “historically sedimented” (2016, p. 185) activity (e.g., communi-
cation or learning), cultures-of-use emerge around the cultural artifacts
(e.g., computer-mediated communication, or CMC, technologies, texts,
pedagogical materials) which mediate such activities. Individuals thus
bring expectations and associations to artifact-mediated activities that are
influenced by both local and cultural histories. Crucially, these associa-
tions do not determine future activity, as individuals make choices within
the union of contextual demands and historical practices. In Thorne’s
(2003) original application of his framework, it was demonstrated that
learners engaged variably in telecollaborative interactions based on the
particular CMC technology used, and that there were significant implica-
tions for language learning and developmental outcomes.
Thus, the cultures-of-use framework allows us to conceptualize digital
resources and technologies as mediating artifacts within a PBLL setting
and to view learner choices within the historical learning experiences of
individuals. In a technology-infused PBLL setting, it is important for edu-
cators to consider that learners come to a learning context with existing
relationships with the target environment in which PBLL activity is situ-
ated, prior understandings of the issues (and language forms) they will
apply or engage, and cultures-of-use that may already surround digital
resources and relevant technologies. Materials, linguistic resources and
instruction, and technologies should be implemented in a manner that
prepares learners for meaningful project-oriented activity and personal
engagement, but it is likely that language learners have developed cul-
tures-of-use surrounding technological platforms and devices and that
these cultures-of-use are not largely centered around learning activity.
Thus, the strategies and behaviors within the Framework for Learning
with Digital Resources constitute a profile of desirable, successful learn-
ing activities that may serve as a target academic culture-of-use. With
this target in mind, customized digital materials may be developed and
implemented in PBLL contexts in such a way that useful learning strate-
gies emerge, granting learners access to the language learning affordances
of these resources in language-learning activity.

The Framework for Learning With Digital Resources
The Framework for Learning with Digital Resources (Table 9.1) emerged
from and was tested through Bikowski and Casal’s (2018) analysis of
developing learner behaviors with customized digital resources in a PBLL
business English writing course. A  general overview of the course and
materials is provided here.

170  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
Table 9.1  The framework for learning with digital resources
Strategy/Process
1. Operational Competence: Recognizes Features in the Digital Learning

Environment
Participant recognizes or discovers the organization, features,

and affordances of the digital learning environment. Successful at
troubleshooting.
2. Learning Competence: Monitors Learning in the Digital Environment
2a. Participant varies or adapts behavior depending on reading or learning
purpose, or affordances of the digital environment.
2b. Participant plans next learning steps after exploring digital content.
3. Learning Competence: Builds Connections While Learning in the Digital
Environment
3a. Participant builds connections between prior knowledge/experiences and
digital material to construct meaning or resolve confusion.
3b. Participant builds connections across ideas or digital material to construct
meaning or resolve confusion.
3c. Participant finds a personally motivating emotional or personal connection
between own experiences and digital material and uses connection to
motivate further learning or exploration.
Source: Adapted from Bikowski & Casal (2018)

Developing the Framework for Learning With
Digital Resources
The PBLL context was a first-year university writing course at an Amer-
ican university that aimed to prepare second language writers for the
written academic tasks they were likely to engage in as undergraduate
business majors. Each term that the course was offered, a local company
or organization served as a semester-long client with whom enrolled stu-
dents interacted in order to accomplish a series of tasks and ultimately
construct business writing genres. During the semester that Bikowski and
Casal’s (2018) study was conducted, a client partnership was formed with
a local non-governmental Environmental Education organization, and
language-learning activity was oriented around the administrative, social,
and financial challenges that the program faced. In other semesters, other
organizations filled this role (for project examples, see Bikowski, 2016;
Bodwell, 2015). Each term, learners needed to collaboratively interact
with organization representatives, employees, customers, and commu-
nity members in order to gather information and solve problems related
to larger tasks and business writing projects. All tasks and projects were
oriented around topics that were relevant to the students’ personal and
professional interests and to the needs of the business or organization,
with the work culminating in a large-scale group-based problem-solution
project targeting the organizational representatives as a partial audience.

Learning With Digital Resources 171
An interactive digital resource package was created for the class using
the iBook-authoring tools, with students provided with an iPad for the
duration of the course as needed. The resource package contained all
information and resources related to the course and was organized into
hypertextual, multimodal unit chapters constructed by members of the
course development team. Materials were customized to the learners’
language abilities and course language goals, to the learners’ cultural
backgrounds when relevant (e.g., example NGOs or geographic land-
marks from student countries) as well as to the particular student pro-
jects (e.g., company background information, interview videos with local
customers). Similarly, extensive usability testing and learner training was
implemented, such that the version of the textbook used in Bikowski and
Casal (2018) had been revised more than nine times through previous
usage.
The analysis which resulted in the framework was based on a two-
cycle coding (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014) of reflective learner
journals, observational notes, and concurrent and retrospective think-
aloud protocols (following, e.g., Chamot  & Kupper, 1989; Charters,
2003), as well as a pre- and post-course engagement survey based on the
Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (Handelsman, Briggs, Sulli-
van, & Towler, 2005). Further descriptions of the context, methodology,
and analysis are available in Bikowski and Casal (2018). The result-
ing framework demonstrates the “rich and complex inter-relationship
between individuals and tools” (Conole, de Laat, Dillon, & Darby, 2008,
p. 521). It can be used to provide guidance for materials development,
learner training, and technology-supported PBLL-based pedagogy, with
the understanding that learner strategies are closely connected to the digi-
tal resources being utilized, and that digital learning artifacts influence a
user’s cognition and therefore learning (Thorne, 2016).

Description of the Framework for Learning
With Digital Resources
The framework outlines emerging behaviors that learners demonstrate
and strategies that they employ while engaging in learning activity with
customized digital materials over time. It is presented as a profile of desir-
able, successful behaviors and strategies of an academic culture-of-use
surrounding digital artifacts in language-learning activity. These behav-
iors and strategies are separated into three categories which are further
associated with either operational or learning competencies according to
Hubbard’s (2004) learner training framework. Operational competencies
identified are those associated with recognizing features in the learning
environment, while learning competencies identified are those associ-
ated with monitoring learning and making connections during learn-
ing. Table  9.1 provides sample behaviors/strategies observed through

172  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
think-aloud protocols, but behaviors associated with each category will
vary depending on the nature of the digital resource, the educational con-
text, and the learning goals.

As seen in Table  9.1, the first category represents a learner’s ability
to recognize features within the digital environment. This includes not
only an understanding of what affordances the resource offers, but also
an understanding of organization, navigation, and basic strategies for
resolving technological difficulties. Knowledge of resource/device opera-
tion is closely associated with strategies and learning behaviors, as learner
choices are reliant on understandings of what options are available to
them. When applied to the interactive digital resources that participants
used in Bikowski and Casal (2018), operational competence includes,
for example, the physical ability to navigate (e.g., swiping on an iPad
screen) and an understanding of how materials are organized in a digital
space (e.g., the relationship between and structure of resources), of what
communicative resources are available through the platform (e.g., com-
puter-mediated communication applications), and of what reference and
support features are available (e.g., dictionaries). Similarly, this includes
an awareness of what notetaking features are available as well as the
ability to recognize the cues for available hyperlinks and glosses. This
is a crucial yet basic level of engagement with digital resources, and it is
often the point at which learner training ends. It is important to note that
learners’ understanding of what is possible and their decision-making
processes regarding how they will interact with a digital learning artifact
is influenced both by training and their past usage of similar resources.

Learning competencies are broken down into monitoring behaviors
(second category) and building connections (third category). Monitoring
behaviors, often considered metacognitive strategies (Chamot & Kupper,
1989) such as planning and varying behavior based on goals, have been
associated with successful language learning. We observed that these
behaviors were crucial in the successful construction of meaning and com-
prehension of language in complex digital resources that, through multi-
modality and hypertextuality, have the potential to overwhelm learners
with choices and information. Many learners were able to locate use-
ful information and reflect on the function of particular linguistic forms
in context based on their immediate goals (e.g., preparing for meetings
with the partner organization; completing a small-scale homework task,
developing an argument in a writing task) while others demonstrated
little intentionality behind their choices. This was especially apparent
when learners were presented with hyperlinked resources that offered
additional linguistic and conceptual content. Often the extent to which
learners invested in course projects and language learning impacted the
extent to which they altered their interaction with digital resources.

The third category, building connections, refers to links that learners
establish between content within a resource (e.g., temporally or between

Learning With Digital Resources 173
modes), between new content and prior knowledge, or between the con-
tent and their own lives and experiences. Connection-building appears
to be a key behavior for constructing meaning across modes and has
important implications for PBLL and deeper learning approaches. While
efforts by learners to connect and compare language and content within
the resource (e.g., across modes or sections) and to their own knowledge
provide opportunities to construct complex understandings of material,
the ability to connect personally with content (and language) material is
central to the aims of PBLL and to the notion of learner investment. Most
learners demonstrated powerful abilities to notice or construct connec-
tions between course projects and content in the digital textbook, to use
non-linguistic modes to discern the function or meaning of linguistically
difficult elements of text, or to motivate their own activity by the end of
the semester.

The Role of These Behaviors in Language Learning
While the ability to recognize the affordances and opportunities that
a digital learning artifact offers language learning (category one) is an
important entry point for language-learning activity, monitoring learn-
ing (category two) and building connections (category three) highlight
two key principles that underlie the framework: that personal engage-
ment in educational activity is essential for learning, and that agency
leads to and is the result of language learning (The Douglas Fir Group,
2016). Both of these assertions are highly connected to PBLL approaches
to language pedagogy, as learning through projects has been connected
to increasingly popular notions of “deeper learning” (The New Media
Consortium, 2017) precisely because of the opportunities it creates for
personal engagement and agentive activity. As can be seen in Table 9.1,
the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources emphasizes that suc-
cessful language learning with digital resources relies on agentive deploy-
ment of a range of behaviors and conscious efforts to bridge the gap
between the learner and the learning activity.

Among the benefits of PBLL is the belief that it can lead to increased
learner motivation, as has been reported more broadly in education
research. Within language-learning contexts, this assumption is based on
the fact that project-based education in general situates the learning activ-
ity in real-world problem-solving rather than in artificially contextualized
simulations or in openly decontextualized classroom tasks. As Norton
Pierce (1995) argued, learners’ decisions to invest in language learning
are often related to perceived connections between learners’ identities
and their imagined futures. Invested learners are likely to engage in learn-
ing behaviors and therefore create more opportunities for such learning.
The ability to personally connect with materials in the PBLL context (and
to the PBLL context itself) often reflects learners’ investment in learning

174  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
activity, as evidenced by their willingness to plan and vary their learning
behaviors.

Learner investment is an important issue in PBLL contexts, as pro-
jects place learning activity at the intersection of the learner, soci-
ety, and the environment, thus enabling students to form meaningful
connections between educational activities and personal goals. Seen
through the notion of investment, such connections are not only likely
to help learners engage in class activity, but to invest in the learning
and use of the language itself. Similarly, PBLL has been connected with
increasingly popular notions of deeper learning, precisely because of
the opportunities it creates for agentive activity and critical thinking.
Technology, as previously mentioned, affords educators a powerful
opportunity to create meaningful, real-world learning opportunities
for learners by drawing the learner and the problem closer to each
other. In the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources, both
agency and investment are highlighted by a learner’s ability to connect
their own knowledge, interests, and goals to the content as well as to
vary the nature of their interaction according to their personal learning
objectives and goals.

PBLL reframes language learning activities such that learners not
only receive ascribed institutional identities, but also “as individual
agents, . . . [who] play a vital role in shaping” (The Douglas Fir Group,
2016, p. 33) their own identities through their own goal-directed behav-
iors. By the end of the semester, language learners who demonstrated the
ability to draw on their own personal and professional identities to make
sense of and customize their activity within the digital learning environ-
ment were able to access the linguistic and conceptual content within the
digital resources as well as the communicative affordances of associated
digital tools and linguistic features encountered in class activity. In this
way, these authors argue that language learners who are meaningfully
engaged in the resolution of PBLL problems may experience more oppor-
tunities to reflect critically on form-function mappings as they employ
and encounter language in use. Instructors in turn can focus language
instruction on the types of interactions that arise from student activity as
well as those that learners are likely to encounter.

PBLL allows learners the responsibility and agency to learn through
actual rather than hypothetical activity, and may lead to agentive lan-
guage users who are equipped to employ language for goal-directed activ-
ity during the course and beyond. The Framework for Learning With
Digital Resources foregrounds that the technologies and digital resources
with which these contexts are infused may enhance this development if
learners are able to recognize the affordances of such resources, to moni-
tor and consciously alter their learning behaviors while utilizing them,
and to build personal and conceptual connections between and with the
materials.

Learning With Digital Resources 175
Putting the Framework Into Action
As previously stated, the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources
profiles desirable, successful learning activities that may serve as a target
academic culture-of-use surrounding a particular digital resource. As
such, it allows educators and curriculum designers to conceptualize the
language learning activity that takes place through the digital resources
provided to enhance PBLL contexts. With these target behaviors and
strategies in mind, the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources
can provide guidance throughout the six steps we identified in our own
technology-infused PBLL project development (see Table 9.2). In the fol-
lowing section, we provide a brief overview of the broad steps involved
in creating and maintaining our technology-infused PBLL course and
discuss how each category of the Framework for Learning With Digital
Resources is represented in this process, and how others may adapt the
process for other contexts.

Constructing Our PBLL Environment
Our process (described in Table 9.2) can be broken down into three over-
lapping dimensions: course development (steps 1–4), materials develop-
ment (step 5), and learner training development (step 6). During the course
development phase of a PBLL project (client organizations included a
local coffee shop interested in increasing international student patronage
or a local environmental non-profit wanting to expand student involve-
ment), the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources may play an
important role in conceptualizing the nature of language-learner activity
while engaged in course work. In our case, the process began with a col-
laborative English for Specific Purposes (ESP) needs analysis that aimed

Table 9.2  Steps in developing our technology-based PBL language learning course

Step Result

1. Conduct needs analysis Profile of (business) genres and relevant
2. Identify learning objectives language
3. Identify project types and scope
4. Establish client relationship List of desired learning outcomes
5. Develop, find, or refine materials List of genres mapped to projects and

6. Develop or modify training plan connected to desired outcomes
Environment for learner problem

solving and project development
Digital materials customized to learners

and project environment, includes
usability testing
Adaptive operational and learning
competence training plan

176  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
to profile the genres that business students were likely to engage with in
our university and in their careers. The needs analysis depended on the
client organization for the project that we had in that semester. For exam-
ple, for the project with a local coffee shop, the needs analysis focused on
what students were interested in or knew regarding the coffee industry
and issues relevant to the particular client (i.e., if they knew about or
cared about free trade, if they were willing to pay more for equal exchange
coffee). The needs analysis drew from business writing textbooks, pub-
lished research, conversations with the Business Department faculty, and
close analysis of sample texts for relevant genres and the work of former
students. With these genre profiles in mind (e.g., a Strengths Weaknesses
Opportunities Threats report and a Recommendation Report), we devel-
oped a list of desired learning outcomes for the course (e.g., students will
be able to analyze  audience and purpose  for  various professional and
academic  writing tasks; be able to annotate  readings with the goal of
writing; be able to engage in the process of secondary research). Potential
project types were then developed around the genre profiles to create
learning opportunities for students; some project types included helping
a small business improve their marketing efforts, increasing awareness
about a social issue in the community, or boosting attendance at specific
events. Project types should be based on the course’s learning outcomes
but also on student interest and on the community context. Potential cli-
ents were then identified in the community based on the extent to which
they provided a suitable PBLL environment. Relationships with clients
are important to the success of the course, as instructors and materials
developers need a nuanced understanding of the organization’s structure
and needs, and organizational agents need to take seriously their com-
mitments regarding information access and time. Each semester these
potential partnerships are re-examined based on their suitability for the
learning objectives. Projects are evaluated based on the following crite-
ria: how well the students were able to meet the learning outcomes; how
useful the client organization found the project (e.g., the recommenda-
tion report, discussions with students) to be for their actual business/
organization; and how interested the students were in the project and
motivated to work with the client organization. Projects that allow stu-
dents to visit their location and/or attend an event (e.g., an environmental
cleanup activity) are generally more interesting and motivating for stu-
dents. The Framework for Learning With Digital Resources (recognizing
features and monitoring learning) may influence the course designers and
educators at this stage of the course development because the learning
behaviors of recognition, monitoring, and connection-building are useful
descriptors of target learning activity.

For us, this was mostly true in terms of connection-building. We
carefully considered the potential personal and professional relevance
and relationships of our client organizations. Working with a local

Learning With Digital Resources 177
Environmental Education program, we knew that our target PBLL activ-
ity of helping the small business raise awareness about fair trade coffee
and ultimately increase sales to students would place language learners
in an authentic context within which to meaningfully use language to
learn language; we therefore sought to structure the learning space to
maximize the potential for students to connect with course activities and
to connect such activities to their professional interests, content, and reg-
isters. For this reason, members of the course development team inter-
viewed students from previous sections of the course as well as leaders
within the Environmental Education program to discuss the suitability
of the project for both parties, researched the intersections of relevant
conceptual dimensions of business and environmental education, and
explored the domain-specific language of relevant written genres (and
tasks involved in completing them). In the end, a partnership with an
Environmental Education program was formed with a focus on learn-
ers’ own geographic identities and understandings of commodification,
social justice incentives, and finance. With the target learning behaviors
in language-learning activity in mind during course development, the
department was able to construct a PBLL environment that encouraged
learners to draw from their own personal lives, professional understand-
ings, and a range of linguistic capacities to accomplish authentic tasks
modeled after the learning activity they were expected to engage in dur-
ing their majors.

Using the Framework for Learning With Digital
Resources to Develop Our Materials
The Framework for Learning With Digital Resources plays a more promi-
nent role in the development of customized learning materials (step 5)
and training plans (step 6). The three categories of target language
learning with digital resource behaviors (i.e., recognizing, monitoring,
and connecting) allow materials and training developers to conceptual-
ize how a learning activity connects with learning objectives and creates
learning and training resources that encourage such activity. While devel-
oping learning materials for our digital textbook, we were able to design
materials that would facilitate the recognition of digital learning features;
for example, we designed intuitive and recurring prompts and cues, using
consistent icons to convey to students that a Deep Thinking question
was being asked and they should stop for reflection. We also created
designs that rewarded and guided the monitoring of learning, such as
by having consistent, clear, and easy-to-navigate labels and captions and
also ensuring that the navigation was user-friendly in the digital text-
book (given that navigation differs between print-based and digital-based
books). Our design also allowed for and encouraged the construction of
personal conceptual and multimodal connections by including content

178  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
that related to students’ backgrounds (e.g., including links and images
from their home countries or regarding their interests) and by connecting
print-based content to embedded videos. In this way, customization of
the links, images, videos, and general content to the client organization
was a crucial component of the success of our project, and we argue
generally for the importance of customization when using digital learn-
ing materials for PBLL contexts. While we used the iBook author tool
for textbook creation, another tool that can be used is TopHat (https://
tophat.com/), which allows educators to create their own interactive,
customized textbooks that include personalized homework assignments.

Customization is perhaps the greatest affordance that many technolo-
gies offer language educators who undertake PBLL approaches. While
digital materials from large publishers may be useful, many technologies
featured in educational technology research provide educators with pow-
erful opportunities to modify and personalize their pedagogical materials
to the educational context and project of focus. Extending Krajcik et al.’s
(1994) discussion of how technology can enhance learning through pro-
jects, digital technologies allow for learners to establish social connections
as well as links between bounded classrooms and real-world contexts. As
a short list of examples, educators can put learners in contact with other
language users through social media and CMC platforms (e.g., students
using CMC resources for collaboration with group members or to con-
tact client representatives); provide relevant language resources through
collaborative knowledge bases and corpus tools (e.g., students explor-
ing domain/genre specific linguistic items in COCA online tools, such as
evaluative adjectives for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
reports); grant access to problem-solving tools and frames through inter-
active graphic data and academic search engines (e.g., students explor-
ing interactive data visualizations, such as food sourcing and trajectory
information to understand the mission of a local Community Supported
Agriculture initiative serving as a client); or highlight content unique to
the local context within which they are working through hyperlinks, cus-
tom videos, and images. In our own experience, the ability to construct
our digital resource package (the course iBook) around the specific tasks,
targets, and contexts learners were working on and within allowed us
to maximize learner’s ability to connect with and immerse themselves in
learning activity, the third component of the Framework for Learning
With Digital Resources. In the course focusing on a local Environmental
Education program, we included images from both the region of our
university (e.g., local biodiversity and interactive maps) and also from
their own countries (e.g., landscapes, sceneries). Students stated that the
material in the book contributed to their motivation to not only research
their projects, but also immerse themselves in the project to the degree
that they chose to participate in out-of-class environmental projects with
the client (e.g., collecting specimens and returning them to their natural

Learning With Digital Resources 179
habitat). The fact that domain-specific (e.g., phrases such as “fair trade”
or “market economy”) and task-specific features of language (e.g., syn-
tactic features useful for critiquing a company in a SWOT report such as
praising the client organization prior to a critique) were presented within
the learning materials allowed students the functional capacity to use
language to get things done, but it also encouraged learners to vary their
learning-based interactions with such materials according to their com-
municative needs. Often, this created opportunities for learners to note
the meaning potentials of linguistic features.

However, providing learners with materials developed with target
behaviors in mind (e.g., varying and planning learning strategies; build-
ing connections within content, between content and prior knowledge,
and personally to content) may be insufficient if learners do not have
established cultures-of-use with relevant digital resources for learning.
For this reason, learner training and usability testing are important com-
ponents of developing a personalized academic culture-of-use based on
the components of the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources
surrounding the digital resource being used for learning. Hubbard (2004)
provides a key distinction between operational and learning competen-
cies, particularly as they relate to learner training, highlighting that learn-
ing with digital resources entails both an understanding of the artifact
and of how to engage with it for meaningful learning activity. Training
represents efforts to help learners develop the strategies and behaviors
associated with learning. On the other hand, usability testing, a con-
sumer-level form of commercial product evaluation that has been imple-
mented in educational technology contexts for language learning (e.g.,
Kessler & Plakans, 2001; Lim, Song, & Lee, 2012), represents efforts to
bring the experiences and choices of learners into materials development.
When combined, learners can draw on their non-academic identities and
personal cultures-of-use surrounding particular technologies while devel-
oping their own academic culture-of-use oriented around learning with
the given technology.

The digital learning materials were developed with the three compo-
nents of the Framework for Learning With Digital Resources as a tar-
get for learning activity and an understanding that training and usability
testing are likely to encourage the development of such behaviors. Con-
cerning the recognition of features in the digital space, students’ vary-
ing expectations for learning with digital resources shaped design. While
students often began the business English course with high proficiency
in operating mobile digital devices, great care was taken to raise learner
awareness of features which are particularly useful for learning activ-
ity (e.g., notetaking and highlighting) through training, and layout was
carefully planned to maximize the recognition of chapter organization,
hypertextuality, and interactive features (e.g., glosses). Recognition of
educational affordances represents the extent to which a learner has

180  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
access to the mediating potential of a digital learning artifact. At a basic
level, this means that the inability to navigate the resource or recognize
cues for interactive multimedia limits a learners’ access to mediation and
content. At this level, instructional cues (such as arrows and captions)
were introduced in the early stages to introduce learners to the types of
actions available to them, and usability testing was conducted to observe
unexpected difficulties or unanticipated limitations to learners’ ability to
recognize affordances. As a simple example, an early stage of usability
testing revealed that many learners did not recognize hyperlinks that
were bolded and red, but did recognize those that were underlined. At
a more complex level, elaborate learning actions that spanned multiple
applications, functions, or even devices, such as note-taking or record-
ing interviews, were targeted through learner training. In other contexts,
materials developers should carefully consider the educational and tech-
nological backgrounds of learners (which will vary greatly from student
to student) and design materials to be as transparent and instructional as
possible. Usability testing will be essential to the identification of missed
affordances or opaque organization and design.

With an understanding of the importance of planning and modi-
fying behaviors based on those plans, learners were trained in digital
previewing and reading strategies. At the same time headings, images,
and keywords were placed to help prompt particular learner behaviors.
For example, reminders of task objectives recurred throughout activities
early on to prompt students to reevaluate their behaviors. Training learn-
ers in skimming, scanning, previewing, and other general reading strate-
gies in a digital space proved useful and often allowed learners to take
advantage of the clearly structured materials. At the same time, when
learners became proficient in such monitoring behaviors, they were able
to provide the instructor with feedback regarding materials that did not
conform to their developed digital expectations, highlighting opportu-
nities for revision. It should be noted that learners often responded to
learner training by developing their own strategies to solve the targeted
problems (e.g., using their smartphone cameras as note-taking tools
rather than in-device resources). In our view, the work of monitoring and
varying learning strategies is important, not engagement in the particular
activities that educators deem important. We therefore encourage learner
autonomy in developing specific processes for working with digital mate-
rials. In other PBLL contexts, materials developers should consider the
relationships between the tasks, materials, larger projects, and learner
goals during development, such that the protocols, layouts, and content
support the short- and long-term goals of students and instructors while
facilitating learners’ variable investment in these goals.

In terms of connection building, chapters were constructed multimo-
dally through images, texts, and videos to reinforce language and content.
Similarly, content was customized to the learners and projects themselves

Learning With Digital Resources 181
to allow for greater personal investment and engagement. The book con-
tained writing-based and content-based discussions that were focused on
the issues the client was facing. In the course revolving around the local
Environmental Education program, for example, materials focused on
small companies and administrations with small budgets. When working
with a small local coffee shop, materials focused on global markets, the
local food movement, and other related aspects. Students then used
the information in order to build their recommendation report, one of
the key business genres focused on in this course.

In other sections of this chapter we have discussed the efforts to cre-
ate a PBLL environment at the union of learners’ academic/professional,
personal, and linguistic objectives, thereby facilitating the opportunities
to draw connections between learning activity and their lives. How-
ever, early in the semester some learners struggled to build connections
between multimodal components of digital resources and to use their
prior knowledge to make sense of their current activity. Our understand-
ing of the importance of these types of connections during materials
development led us to design both materials and training plans to assist
learners in developing these capacities. Much of this was approached
through learner training, where iterative collaborative activities targeted
the application of prior knowledge to novel contexts in linguistic and
conceptual domains, as well as synthesis and summary tasks that drew
from multiple communicative modes. However, there were efforts to
facilitate this behavior in the digital materials as well, primarily through
prompts that encouraged students to draw links or reflect on their own
understandings.

The Framework for Learning With Digital Resources allowed us to
develop materials that were customized for our PBLL context in such
a way that functionality was highlighted (category one), goals were
explicit so that learners could plan and vary behaviors (category two),
and activity was meaningful, engaging, and relevant (category three). For
those working in other technology-infused PBLL contexts, this is a useful
distillation of the learning behaviors into design principles. Following
these principles should facilitate a digital materials design that encour-
ages learners to dynamically interact with and invest in language-learning
behaviors within the meaningful PBLL environments in which their activ-
ity is situated.

As a final illustrative example, we discuss a specific technology-based
PBLL task designed with our framework in mind and embedded within
the context of a larger PBLL project. As part of the final project with the
local coffee shop, student groups polled community members and cli-
ent organization customers (e.g., finding out what potential clients knew
about fair trade and what motivated their purchasing choices), which
gave them important information to justify the solutions they were pro-
posing (e.g., to educate customers on the need for fair trade coffee and

182  J. Elliott Casal and Dawn Bikowski
on how the higher price was justified). In an important language-focused
activity, students analyzed and constructed digital surveys, and students
used the course iPads to survey relevant populations in the community
to collect their own data. Classroom activity earlier that week focused
linguistically on interviewing strategies (possibilities can include question
formation, socio-pragmatic considerations such as syntactic and non-
language options to demonstrate politeness and respect), and learners
worked through digital design tutorials to raise their awareness of the
digital organization and technological affordances of the survey software
they were using (Google Forms). Given the centrality of the data to their
final projects, students were notably invested in appropriately formulat-
ing their survey questions as they carefully weighed the ramifications
of various choices; they had to work carefully to match the questions
they asked potential customers to the information they needed in order
to create their final recommendation report. Most learners developed
the ability to operate the device and navigate the digital task, to build
strong connections between the language they employed and the types
of answers they may receive, and to make reasoned decisions based on
their objectives. Students discussed the consequences of various tense
and vocabulary decisions as well as how ambiguity could influence the
responses they elicited.

Conclusion
In this chapter we presented a framework for conceptualizing the behav-
iors of language learners engaged with digital resources in PBLL envi-
ronments and for designing such digital materials. In our context, these
customized digital materials played a crucial role in the success of the
PBLL approach to business English. Overall, students reported that the
interactive digital textbook encouraged them to engage more in course
activity and in more meaningful ways. Particularly, students commented
that when places and people they interacted with during their learn-
ing activity appeared within their digital textbook (through images, vid-
eos, references), they were reminded of the reality of their actions and
meaning of their work while learning English. When reflecting on the
relationship that they developed with the digital resources and mobile
devices, students personified them as helpers, guides, and even as friends.
Personal engagement and connection with learning activities is at the
heart of successful project-based language learning, but these reflections
highlight that learners may develop positive relationships with learn-
ing artifacts as well. Such device rapport reminds us that digital learn-
ing resources and devices are not ancillary to learning experiences, but
rather are embedded within learning activity. Educators should there-
fore be cognizant of the learning activities they expect language learners
to engage in as they design digital learning artifacts and train learners

Learning With Digital Resources 183

to use them in pedagogically sound ways. The Framework for Learn-
ing With Digital Resources can assist educators by highlighting the
division between operational and learning competencies as well as the
importance of students being able to monitor their learning and build
connections in technology-supported PBLL contexts. The Framework
therefore allows educators to conceptualize target learning behaviors so
that PBLL contexts can be infused with facilitating and transforming
digital resources that learners are willing to engage with and capable of
doing so in complex ways.

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