On the Monolingual Bias in Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning: Current Status and Future Directions

초록

The monolingual approach has served as a strong impetus for L2 teaching and research since the 20th century. However, post-2000 has seen a growing amount of support for the non-monolingual approach from different strands of research, including sociocultural, psycholinguistics, and SLA studies. Despite such growth, it has been suggested that CALL research has still not yet given much attention to non-monolingual themes, leaving the value of the non-monolingual approach unexamined in the CALL context. In view of this suggestion, the present study was conducted to examine the extent to which the articles published in the current journal (i.e., Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning) over the past two decades have been influenced by the monolingual bias. To this end, a wide range of keywords related to the non-monolingual approach (e.g., bilingual, multilingual, translanguaging, L1, translation) have been employed to identify studies that have addressed non-monolingual themes. The results revealed that non-monolingual themes are rather under-researched in the current journal, and even skewed in terms of the target themes. Based on this finding, we encourage researchers to pay greater attention to the non-monolingual approach, seeking to examine its values in the CALL context.

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