Journal of Computer Assisted Learning

2.1 Multiliteracies pedagogy

Multiliteracies is first introduced by The New London Group (1996) as a way of conceptualizing the notion of literacy reflecting an increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the current society with a multiplicity of text forms associated with various information and communication technologies. Multiliteracies pedagogy is a teaching approach that is based on the epistemological assumption:

human knowledge is developed not as “general and abstract,” but as embedded in social, cultural, and material contexts. Further, human knowledge is initially developed as part and parcel of collaborative interactions with others of diverse skills, backgrounds, and perspectives joined together in a particular epistemic community, that is, a community of leaners engaged in common practices centered around a specific (historically and socially constituted) domain of knowledge. (The New London Group, 1996, p. 82)

Multiliteracies pedagogy is accordingly explained by the group as “a complex integration of four factors” (p. 83): situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. Although the four interrelated factors may occur simultaneously in actual pedagogical settings, each factor respectively suggests the following principles:

• Situated practice: Learners participate in meaningful multiliteracies practices within a community of learners who can play various roles based on their backgrounds and experiences.
• Overt instruction: The multiliteracies practices are guided and facilitated by teachers (or experts) who provide active interventions at “teachable” moments to help learners gain conscious awareness of what is being learned and how it is learned.
• Critical framing: Learners are able to reflect on their learning process and denaturalize what they have learned and critically examine their multiliteracies practices in relation to their social and cultural contexts.
• Transformed practice: Through this process, learners revise and change their meaning‐making practices according to their own goals and values, which would ultimately have an effect on redeveloping cultural practices or assumptions.

Thus, a central focus of multiliteracies pedagogy is to design learning environments that engage students in meaningful literacy practices involving multiple forms (or modes) of meaning‐making experiences. The general principles suggested by multiliteracies pedagogy are correspondent to the predominant pedagogical ideas shared by social constructivist learning theorists who perceive learning as a knowledge construction process through participating in collaborative practices of social communities (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978). However, the essential goal of gaining conscious awareness of social problems (i.e., social inequality) and reforming cultural practices that cause those problems is a rather unique component of multiliteracies pedagogy.

English language education informed by multiliteracies pedagogy, therefore, needs to provide learners with opportunities to cognitively and critically engage with multimodal forms of meaning‐making practices within collective learning communities, but also in personally meaningful ways. Ultimately, the effective language learning practices would enable and encourage learners to invest in and negotiate their linguistic and cultural identities and develop critical language awareness, through which they can understand various power effects created by language use in their own cultural and social contexts (Cummins, 2001, 2004; Cummins, Brown, & Sayers, 2007).

2.2 Critical pedagogy

Critical pedagogy, grounded in the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, aims to empower students to question and challenge dominant social beliefs and practices, which are often taken‐for‐granted by students themselves despite the negative effects that they have on their lives (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, 1993; Freire, 1995; McLaren, 2003). This teaching approach foregrounds the unequal conditions of schooling, in relation to larger socio‐economic inequality, and its oppressive social functions that serve to marginalize certain groups of students (Giroux, 1981). Bourdieu (1986), in his book The forms of capital, introduces three interlinked types of capital: economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. Among them, cultural capital refers to the “inherited” properties of a person that are mostly gained from his or her family, providing him/her a higher status in a society. An unequal amount of cultural capital possessed by families from different social classes creates unequal conditions for their children's continuing acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991). Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital has been taken up by many critical pedagogues to unpack and decode the socialization (or marginalization) process of schooling (Apple, 1998; Lin, 1999; Sandoval, 2000; Willis, 2003).

Families from dominant social classes provide their children with initial advantages of cultural capital (in this case, the particular forms of knowledge required to succeed in the school system). For example, literacy (or academic skills more broadly) is a form of cultural capital. Children from different social classes tend to start their schooling with unequal levels of abilities to read and write, which then results in unequal educational experiences among them subsequently. Those children with more cultural capital do better in their schooling, benefit more from the school curriculum, and in turn, obtain further cultural capital—more and faster—than those children from marginalized social classes. In this sense, the current educational system does not enable students to overcome different inequality issues in their lives, which are deeply rooted in the large socio‐economic inequality. On the contrary, it supports and reproduces unequal power relationships between dominant and marginalized social classes (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991). Through this educational socialization process, therefore, the inequality among students from different social classes tends to be maintained and reinforced unless teacher and students consciously and collectively resist the reproduction mechanism and strive to disturb the socialization process.

Discourse is another useful concept that can be discussed in relation to one particular form of cultural capital, namely, those learning attitudes that are considered right or appropriate in the current educational system. Discourse, understood as a set of knowledge, rules, and regulations, is a central notion in Foucauldian analyses of power relations between disciplinary institutions (e.g., schools or prisons) and individuals who participate in institutional practices. According to Foucault (1995), discourse governs and controls people's thoughts and behaviours through different forms of institutional rules and regulations that exert disciplinary power upon people's thoughts and behaviours. Among multiple competing discourses in a social regime, certain dominant discourses decide which thoughts and behaviours are more legitimate than others (Foucault, 1995). Dominant discourses consist of a particular set of norms, which create different human subjectivities and divide people into often dichotomous groups: the “normal” and the “abnormal or problematic.” In any school context, there will be some particular set of norms identifying good and bad learning attitudes and behaviours. Those norms (i.e., dominant discourses) in turn identify and classify students—for example, as “a good versus bad student” or “an active versus passive student” (see Comber, 1997).

As a consequence, discourse imposes unequal values on different learning attitudes and skills, and those that are more valued often turn into forms of cultural capital that privileged students are more likely to possess and that disadvantaged students find it much more difficult to obtain. Yet, despite the controlling and discriminating nature of the disciplinary (i.e., educational) practices in school context, due to the taken‐for‐grantedness of discourse, it is almost impossible for individual students to challenge or resist the dominant discourse (Dean, 2010). Therefore, critical pedagogues call for the collective efforts of teachers and students to become conscious about the unequal educational practices existing in their classroom and to further question and challenge dominant social and educational discourse and their ramifications in the lives of those being educated.

4.1 Participants

As a teacher–researcher, the author designed and taught a 3‐week‐long English course utilizing the CaMP framework in a Korean public middle school at which she was teaching English. An Iranian EFL teacher–researcher, a colleague of the author from the same doctoral programme in Canada, and her thesis supervisor, a well‐known second language educator, participated in the original research project and supported the implementation of the CaMP in the two EFL classes. Twenty‐three Korean students voluntarily registered for the course and agreed to participate in the project (Table 2). Informed consent from their parents and the school principal about their participation in the research project was also obtained. All student participants were in Grades 7 to 9 (aged 13 to 15). Although the level of English among students was varied, most students were at a beginner level. Over the 3 weeks, the Korean class met every day from Monday to Friday for a 2‐hr session, with a 10‐min break in the middle. The class was virtually connected to the Iranian partner class through the CaMP‐site. In the partner class, 22 individual Iranian students (aged 14 to 15), attending different schools but located in the same neighbourhood, were recruited (Table 2). The Iranian teacher–researcher first recruited a class of 17 Iranian female students from her school, a private female middle school in Tehran. Subsequently, she recruited five more male students through her personal contacts with their families.

4.2 Data sources

Data were collected from multiple sources. Yin (2003) suggests that it is important to collect multiple data sources and to provide a detailed case description for a qualitative case study, particularly when the study focuses on a single case. The most important data source was the author's field notes, in which she chronologically recorded the entire process of designing and teaching the CMIC‐implemented English course.

While designing and preparing the special summer course, the author was also teaching four regular Grade 9 English classes at the same middle school. Each class had approximately 25 students. Their learning behaviours and attitudes were also recorded in order to produce more comparative understanding about students' experiences in the CMIC‐implemented English course. While teaching the 3‐week‐long CMIC‐implemented English course, the author closely interacted with the 22 student participants and observed their behaviours and attitudes in the daily sessions. Immediately after each session, the author had a Skype conversation with the Iranian teacher–researcher each day. The two teacher–researchers shared their experiences, thoughts, and feelings; discussed some of the issues noticed; and considered different courses of action that could be taken to address the issues. Additionally, the author wrote a daily journal entry recording the students' behaviours and attitudes in each session and the follow‐up conversations with the Iranian teacher–researcher. Even though there were no formal interviews conducted, the author continued to have informal conversations with the student participants and two other English teachers at her school throughout the course: Those conversations were also recorded in the author's field notes.

The second major data source was the Korean students' responses to the course evaluation questionnaire, which included six open‐ended questions about their English learning experiences in the CMIC‐implemented English course. The questions posed were as follows:

• How would you describe your experiences in this summer English course?
• In general, what do you think about this summer English course?
• In general, what do you think about learning English?
• What were the most valuable aspect(s) of the course?
• What were the least valuable or the most difficult aspect(s) of the course?
• What are your future plan(s) about English learning?

These two sets of written texts were initially analysed using constant comparative methods (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Three dimensions of the initial coding schemes consisted of acting subjects (teacher, student, and group), the five stages of the CaMP framework, and the seven CMIC activities in the framework (see Table 1). The coding results were discussed with, and member‐checked by, the Iranian teacher–research and her doctoral supervisor; and the results were subsequently revised. Other class artefacts, including student learning outcomes, video clips, discussion threads, and chat records, were also collected and used for the additional data triangulation process (see Golafshani, 2003).

4.3 Results

The detailed description of students' experiences and perceptions in the CMIC‐implemented EFL classes can be found in the previously published article (Lee et al., 2016). This section recapitulates how Korean students' learning experiences in the CMIC‐implemented English course differed from ones in a more traditional English class.

1. Instructional focus: Grammar‐translation versus communication

The regular English class at the participant Korean school mainly consisted of grammar lectures and reading‐and‐translation practices lacking in communicative approaches to language learning as other researchers have previously reported about many EFL classes (e.g., Butler, 2011; Coskun, 2011; Jeon, 2009; Wong, 2012). The learning content was entirely provided by the teacher, whereas the students remained silent throughout a 45‐min session (four sessions per week) except when responding to teacher's closed‐answer questions. Many students seemed to have difficulties in fully concentrating on the teacher's lecture, and a few students were dozing off or texting (doing something with their mobile phones). Although each unit of the English textbook used did include some activities meant to support communicative actions, in reality, what was observed tended to be rather mechanical and based on the prescripted conversations with little deviation. Due to the large volume of subject content that each lesson was required to cover, the teacher found it difficult to allocate sufficient time to the communicative activities, which doubtless constrained the exploratory nature of students' conversations.

On the other hand, the CMIC course, which was virtually connected to the English class in Iran, chiefly focused on communicative activities. Each Korean student was paired with an Iranian student (or two Iranian students) as a conversation partner and the pair exchanged cultural information and knowledge using the English language. Each student prepared and led their conversations with Iranian students according to their own interests, without the teacher's direct intervention. Students showed genuine enthusiasm and excitement about the course structure that provides opportunities to meet and interact with “foreign friends.” This was clearly shown in the students' course evaluation results (see details in Lee et al., 2016). All 23 Korean students initiated the online conversations at least twice during the 3‐week period. All 22 students were actively engaged in and contributed to all of the communicative activities (except one student who had a health problem) despite the voluntary nature of the participation in this summer class.

2. English: School subject versus intercultural communication tool

In the regular English class, students' learning achievement was evaluated exclusively based upon the accuracy of their responses to multiple‐choice or short‐answer questions in written exams. In this context, English tended to be perceived by many students just as one of the academic subjects that they need to study for getting a good score on those paper exams (see Kim, 2013, and this is also indicated in the students' responses in the course evaluation). However, participating in a series of CMIC activities effectively changed the common perception of English among EFL students—from a piece of knowledge including grammatical rules and lexical items often distant from their real‐life communication practices to a communication tool that enables them to interact with people in other cultural contexts and so to learn about other cultures. In fact, most of the Korean EFL students in the course (N = 17 out of 23) mentioned, in the course evaluation questionnaire, that talking to the Iranian students increased their motivation to improve their English communicative competence as a mean of learning more about other cultures.

In the collective writing stage (see Table 1 above), the Korean students as a group produced videos about different aspects of Korean culture to introduce Korea to their Iranian partners: Each group focused on (a) popular Korean food, Kimchi; (b) traditional Korean clothing, Hanbok; (c) Korean pop music and singers; (d) travel information about Korea's capital, Seoul; and (e) Dokdo Island, a territory whose ownership is subject to dispute between Korea and Japan. The Korean students also watched a series of videos about Iran produced by the Iranian students, which generated interesting discussions about the differences and similarities between Iran and Korea. The Korean class, then, invited the Iranian teacher via Skype to ask further questions about Iran and Iranian culture. This “e‐conference” activity was led by the Korean students who asked a list of prepared questions, with some linguistic support of their teacher, about particular aspects of Iranian culture, which are “shockingly strange” (students' expression). For example, the Korean students wanted to know why female and male students in Iran cannot attend the same school or have direct conversations. Another interesting question was about whether Iranian women are allowed to wear jeans and short skirts in public. Here, all students became active learners of Iran's culture and fully engaged in the CMIC that was fundamentally guided by their own inquiries.

3. Communication: Linguistic practices versus multimodal practices

Unlike the regular English class in the Korean school that focused exclusively on English literacy (i.e., how to read and write print‐based texts), the CMIC course provided students with various channels and digital media for communication. Korean students participated in a series of “Intercultural Communication” activities with their Iranian partners (and the teacher) using CMC technologies and social networking tools (e.g., chat tool and Skype), whereas students were also engaged in e‐text reading activities to search and learn about Iran and Iranian culture (e.g., hypertexts, Wikipedia, and Google). In particular, for the collaborative media project that aimed to introduce Korean culture to Iranian students, each group of the Korean students chose a topic, collected the required information and visual resources, and created a short video clip—using multiple means to present and communicate their ideas with others (e.g., Movie Maker and PowerPoint). By experiencing these multimodal communication practices, students were able to expand their previously narrowly constructed understanding of English literacy to encompass media literacy.

It will be useful to illustrate this matter using an example. Han, a 15‐year‐old male student, had relatively low English communicative competence and learning motivation: In the informal conversations with the teacher, he openly stated that it was his mother who had forced him to register to the course despite his lack of interest in learning English. At the beginning of the course, it was noticeable that he was not enthusiastic about writing his online profile nor talking with his assigned Iranian conversation partner. At the end of the first week, the class moved to the computer lab to search and read e‐text about Iran. Initially, the students used domestic Korean search engines with Korean search terms and retrieved only a small amount of search results—there was, in fact, not much pertinent information (about Iranian culture) available in the Korean language. Subsequently, it was Han who searched resources using global search engines (e.g., Google and Yahoo) and thereby retrieved a large number of images and video produced in different languages (largely in English and Persian). Those images and videos portrayed popular culture in Iran, in which the class showed a great interest. Han also used and encouraged his peers to use Google Translate to understand what the searched images referred to. He actively engaged in the collaborative media project, through which he made meaningful contributions to developing the group presentation by collecting various media resources and editing the video. For his part of the video presentation, he proudly mentioned later to the teacher that he had practiced reading the presentation script more than 10 times and said that this was the first time for him to make an effort to learn English. Although, from the traditional linguistic perspective, there was no remarkable improvement in his English communicative competence during the relatively short period of the course, he showed a great deal of positive change in his attitude towards English communication, which he came to increasingly see as a set of multimodal practices.

5.1 Data re‐analysis

This study aims to develop a deeper understanding of the course of events observed in the case and their social effects upon EFL learners and learning, which were not highlighted sufficiently in previously published accounts. This explanatory case study is based on the paradigm of critical educational research, which has emerged from recognizing the critical limitations of both positivist and interpretivist paradigms. Those paradigms both often neglect (or underemphasize) the political and ideological conditions of many educational contexts (Gage, 1989). In contrast, the paradigm of critical educational research, heavily influenced by Critical Theory, sees educational research as a deliberately political activity aiming to reveal unequal social and educational conditions, to empower students to take control of their learning conditions and to bring about transformative changes in schools (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011). This paradigm has directly informed my selection of (a) a theoretical framework that guides my meaning‐making process about the educational phenomenon under investigation and (b) the critical events within the focused case.

Acknowledging the difficult nature of qualitative research in terms of demonstrating its reliability and validity, this case study utilized the concept of “critical friends” for ensuring the “trustworthiness” of the research outcomes (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The author first reanalysed the data and drew some preliminary findings about the pedagogical challenges and social issues experienced by EFL teachers and students in the CMIC‐implemented course. The two other Korean English teachers at the participant school reviewed my findings and made some suggestions, which have been all incorporated in my results section below. The Iranian English teacher–researcher who taught the Iranian partner class was also invited to be a third reader of the results in the member‐checking process. Next, the author developed tentative theoretical explanations about those challenges and issues utilizing the selected theories. To sharpen (or validate) the explanations and explore a more effective approach to adopting the CMIC activities in EFL class, the author had an in‐depth conversation with the two Korean English teachers again after writing an initial version of the account presented in this paper, particularly focusing on the feasibility and the applicability of the arguments made to their own teaching practice. Section 5.2 will focus on the pedagogical challenges and social issues that were observed and identified in the CMIC‐implemented course. Section 6 will offer some theory‐informed pedagogical principles that, it is argued, may guide other EFL teachers' effective adoption of CMIC activities in their classes.

5.2 Results

Regardless of the careful design and planning of the CMIC activities in the course, the implementation of such courses brought about numerous pedagogical challenges in the Korean class. Diverse issues of inequality, although not necessarily new or directly created by the implementation of the activities, were revealed and made more salient in the course as compared with the traditional classes. In the following section, a few examples, coming out of the author's secondary analysis of the collected data based on the analytic lens explained in the previous section, are provided.

1. Pedagogical challenges and a high cost of its implementation

To begin with, one of the critical challenges that most EFL teachers would face when implementing the CMIC activities in their classrooms is perhaps related to its high cost in terms of the required level of teacher's cultural and social capital as explained below. One of the essential components of this course was to connect the Korean class with Iranian students, which was mainly based on the two teachers' international connections. It would not be possible for individual EFL teachers in Korea without such a close contact with other teachers in different cultural contexts to implement such pedagogical initiatives in their classrooms. Additionally, but more fundamentally, such intercultural collaborative teaching, between EFL classes across two or more cultural contexts, requires teachers to possess a high level of cultural capital (or linguistic capital: that is, a sufficient level of English communicative competence). It should be noted that the author, a Korean teacher, in this study possesses a much higher level of cultural capital, fundamentally gained from her relatively privileged educational and socio‐economic background, 1 than the average level of capital that EFL teachers in Korean public schools have. Previous studies, in fact, suggested that a large group of EFL teachers struggled with their low level of English communicative competence when applying a communicative language teaching approach in their classrooms (see Butler, 2011; Li, 1998; Nunan, 2003).

Second, despite the relatively high level of the author's capital, there were a number of contextual problems that significantly hindered the effective implementation of the course. Some of those contextual problems are institutional, such as irreconcilable differences between the Korean and Iranian class sizes and academic calendar. Yet a number of the contextual problems are more subtle and less predictable, implicating social and cultural constraints.

One example is that right before the course started, the administrators of the Iranian female school raised concerns about their female students being in “direct contact” (even if that contact was virtual) with male Korean students. They would not allow the course to be implemented unless this issue could be addressed. Thus, the Iranian teacher had to recruit individual students from outside the participating school in order to facilitate pairing the nine male Korean students to Iranian students as one‐to‐one conversation partners. Even with these arrangements in place, managing some of the class‐to‐class communication tasks in ways that prevented direct contact between female students in Iran school group and the nine Korean male students required time‐consuming management effort. Another significant example relates to the low level of some Iranian students' participation in the CMIC activities—particularly those with religious family background. The course was implemented in Iran just before the Ramadan period (the ninth month in Muslim calendar, which is considered the holy month), and so some families embarked on a spiritual trip, during which participants lacked internet access, or otherwise restricted their children's social and academic activities, including those using CMC tools. A couple of Korean students who had not received prompt responses from their Iranian partners for these reasons showed a significant level of frustration and dissatisfaction with the course; nevertheless, the Korean teacher could not do much about this problem.

Another example occurred when the Korean students uploaded their video clips to YouTube. At that point, the Iranian government unexpectedly blocked the public access to the YouTube site as part of ongoing Internet censorship practices. Although the Iranian teacher sent out the video files to each student by email instead, due to the slow download speed in Iran, both the Iranian teacher and students experienced significant inconvenience. Also, the originally expected student interactions on the YouTube site, using that site's “comments” features, did not take place. This limitation in access to the learning materials and environment also significantly decreased the Iranian students' learning motivation and participation. Although students in both classes expressed great interest in meeting foreign friends and learning about each other's culture, leading those interested students towards active participation in the communication activities and supporting meaningful CMIC experiences was not a straightforward process for the teachers. Thus, it can be argued that the cost of implementing the intercultural communication activities in the actual classroom settings is high, which requires a sufficient level of teachers' social and cultural capitals and their thoroughgoing commitment to the course including considerable personal time and effort to innovate or change teaching practices.

2. Issues of unequal cultural capitals among students

Even though most students were active throughout the course, it would not be accurate to conclude on that basis that all students equally participated in and benefited from the authentic English communication opportunities provided in the course. There were pre‐existing gaps in the cultural (or linguistic) capital that each student brought with them to the course, and such inherent socio‐economic inequalities in the actual social schooling context were reflected in, as well as influential upon, each student's learning practices and outcomes in the CMIC. Transferring the instructional focus from grammar‐translation to communication, in ways that required students to be active English speakers, in fact, made the disparity in students' English language proficiency more salient in the course than within the regular English classes.

The following two cases may effectively demonstrate how such disparity in students' linguistic capitals influenced their learning attitudes and outcomes in the course.

One 14‐year‐old female student, Min, had been sent by her parents to Australia during her primary school years, mainly for the purpose of learning English. Min had also been taking private English lessons since her return to Korea. On the other hand, another 14‐year‐old male student, Jang, had never had actual English speaking opportunities prior to the course. In his informal conversation with the teacher, he implied that that was mainly because his family was not able to afford any costly private English education offering actual English speaking opportunities (e.g., a small group tutoring by a foreign teacher and a study‐abroad programme). Min, from the beginning of the course, showed great enthusiasm for the series of intercultural communicative activities, whereas Jang rarely expressed his own ideas and remained quiet throughout the course. Min was a member of the group that produced a video clip about political issues related to Dokdo Island, which was the most complicated topic among the five chosen within the class, and she took the leading role in her group. In contrast, Jang took a rather passive role in his group, which produced a video clip about Korean pop music and singers: He introduced his favourite singer using a few simple English sentences.

Although Min was able to have meaningful conversations with her Iranian partner, Jang was only able to use the opportunity to exchange simple greetings and superficial information about Korea and himself with his partner. These differences between the two students' CMIC experiences in the course reflected the considerable gap between their levels of English communication competence, in this case a product of their different cultural capitals, and it was certainly not an easy task for individual teachers to address. Therefore, it is difficult to claim that adopting CMIC activities actually offered an “equal” access to communication opportunities to students at all levels. Each student's learning experiences in this course was fundamentally influenced by the extent of cultural capital that each of them had brought into the course from outside.

3. Issues of an unequal process of subjectification of a good student

If one simply adopts a (social) constructivist approach to teaching and evaluation, the answer to the question “who are the good students?” in the intercultural communicative course clearly differs from the ones in the regular, or more common, EFL classes. In other words, in the new course, active participants in the given communicative tasks are considered as “better students” than those passive listeners. In the regular EFL classes, receptive learning behaviours such as listening to teachers, taking notes, and reading textbooks silently are rewarded as legitimate classroom behaviours, whereas active and self‐directed or self‐expressive behaviours (e.g., discussing, creating, and sharing) are more valued and rewarded in the intercultural communicative course.

It is important to note that that distinction is not merely an external, analytical point. The differences in legitimate student behaviours in the two classrooms were reflected in the language used by the teacher in each setting. At the most basic level, it is common to observe in the regular classroom, the teacher saying “be quiet” or “listen carefully,” whereas in the communicative course, the teacher continued to ask her students to “be active” or “speak up.” Nonetheless, despite this shift in classroom norms or desired behaviours, it was noted that those active participants in the communicative course were, in fact, the same students who were considered good in the regular English classes. Regardless of the change of the instructional discourses, the students who followed the appropriate class norms and behaved accordingly were more positively perceived by the teacher (or institution, which is a school in this case) than the students who did not in both discursive contexts. Going back to the two student cases discussed above, it was a certainly the case that Min was doing much better even in the regular English class and on her exam than Jang. The difference was more salient in the case of Jang whose learning behaviours (e.g., being quiet) were not perceived as problematic and bad in the regular class, 2 whereas it was clear that he was not (or more likely, not able to be) a good student in the communicative course without having a certain level of English communicative competence.

It may be also important to note that, in the third stage of the course, the collective writing (see Table 1) students with similar levels of English communicative competence spontaneously formed groups together for the collaborative media project. As a result, unequal cultural capitals were distributed among the five groups, and subsequently, the complexity of the topic each group selected and the quality of each group's outcome tended to correspond to the level of its members' cultural and linguistic capitals. A more striking difference among the five groups was in the quality of their collaboration processes. For example, whereas students in the Dokdo group, to which Min belonged, seemed to know exactly how to collaborate on the project not only effectively but also efficiently, the group that dealt with the least complex topic (i.e., Korean traditional food Kimchi) continually consulted with the teacher on what to do. Inevitably, the students in the former group were more engaged in the whole learning process and produced a better outcome than the latter group—the gap was significant.

This difference, again, indicates that each student possessed an unequal level of cultural capital referring to certain forms of academic skills and communication or collaboration abilities that were less likely taught in the traditional education settings. Despite the fact that the teacher was conscious of the different levels of prior knowledge and skills with which each group started their project, she was not able to give all groups the same grade but had to give the Dokdo group students higher grades. In the communicative course, the inequalities among Korean students related to different socio‐economic backgrounds that each of them came from tended to be reinforced by the new set of learning norms and expectations for being a good student.

4. Issues of the unequal status of English speakers and the unequal formation of students' linguistic identities

It should not be denied that EFL students as active participants in the course clearly had more opportunities to express their thoughts, interests, and needs compared with other EFL students in the regular classes where those opportunities were rarely available in the first place. Sue, a 14‐year‐old female student with an extremely outgoing and bright personality was one of the students who had often been admonished by her teacher for her bad classroom behaviours (e.g., not concentrating on the teacher's lectures, chatting, and texting) in the regular English classrooms where she had never been given a chance to vocalize her ideas. Although she was not necessarily a good student in terms of her academic achievement 3 or classroom behaviours, she certainly was very popular among her friends. In the communicative course, Sue initially showed a great level of excitement about talking to her Iranian partner and working on the collaborative media project. She did not only actively participate in but also led the classroom discussions and shared lots of interesting ideas and well‐received suggestions throughout the course. For example, to introduce Korean traditional clothing Hanbok more effectively to Iranian students, she brought her own Hanbok and videotaped herself and her group members wearing Hanbok. She repeatedly came to the teacher to request for diverse supports (e.g., using a school iPad and accessing to an empty classroom and proofreading their English script).

It might be expected that such active and self‐regulated learning experiences would empower students to fully exercise their autonomy in their learning processes and possibly thereby enable them to overcome or at least partially ameliorate their differences in cultural capital. In other words, more autonomous and motivated students might potentially liberate themselves from their prior constraints and improve their educational and living conditions. The transformative nature of the attitude changes that Sue showed in the communicative course and, subsequently, the positive changes of teacher perception on her as an active (and therefore “good”) student was expected to be an instance of that phenomenon: empowering students and potentially liberating them from the marginalization function of schooling.

However, a couple of days after her group's video was uploaded online to be shared with Iranian students, Sue asked the teacher to remove the video because she felt embarrassed about the strong Korean accent in her English speech in it. She directly said “my English sounds stupid! It does not sound like English at all.” She also compared her accent with the accents of other students who had gone abroad to learn English; she clearly perceived that their accent more closely resembled the “ideal” than her own. Although there was subsequently a classroom discussion about the Iranian students and teacher's accent, which encompassed the idea of English as a global language that needs to be more inclusive about diverse forms and accents (rather than viewed normatively in light of American or British accents), Sue remained upset about her “Korean accent” that she persisted in perceiving as inferior.

When it comes to the formation of EFL students' linguistic identities, the unequal status of English speakers in the broader EFL context seems to play a more powerful role in the process than the actual quality of students' performances in the communicative course. Similarly, the prevalent idea of “native English” as some sort of gold standard among students remains difficult to challenge and deconstruct—just as Sue stubbornly refused to accept her Korean accent as a legitimate English accent. In this case, it is difficult to argue that she fully exercised her autonomy in resisting the negative social meaning attached to non‐natives' English and constructing a positive linguistic identity of herself, despite her active participation in the CMIC activities.

6.1 Set up a political goal of the pedagogical initiatives

The first principle requires teachers not to be naïve actors serving the unequal schooling mechanisms by uncritically exercising their pedagogical power upon students but to be transformative intellectuals 4 who make “the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical (Giroux, 1988, p. 127).”

Conceptually speaking, the first step towards becoming a transformative intellectual is to be aware of social and cultural inequalities in the education context, including the issues discussed in the previous section and recognize the struggles that disadvantaged students experience in the EFL educational settings. The second step is to develop a self‐image as a political actor who critiques and changes (or improves) the unequal educational conditions to alleviate the issues of inequalities and reduce the reproduction power of education. The third step is, then, to educate and empower students to also become political actors who contribute to the development of a more equal and less oppressive future. It may be necessary for teachers to have a solid theoretical ground, which can effectively guide their reflective practices, involving a complicated—certainly not so straightforward—course of action. This article suggests that critical pedagogy can offer effective guidance for that praxis.

According to Burbules and Berk (1999), critical pedagogy is an effort “to raise questions about inequalities of power, about the false myths of opportunity and merit for many students, and about the way belief systems become internalized to the point where individuals and group abandon the very aspiration to question or change their lot in life” (p. 50). Critical pedagogy, in fact, originally emerged from the context of literacy education aiming to foster “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1995, p. 17). On that basis, “reading the world” through literacy practices such as reading and decoding “texts” is a central strategy of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1998). In this sense, both the political aims and the pedagogical strategies offered by critical pedagogy can be useful for the EFL teachers when implementing the CMIC activities in their classroom. Of courses, taking up this theoretical approach would neither immediately remove some of the pedagogical challenges in the course nor directly reduce the cost of its implementation. However, this will enable teachers to perceive one's pedagogical praxis as a political action based on moral commitment to students' well‐being and, consequently, to set up a political goal of implementing such initiatives in a personally meaningful way, which may compensate some of their effort in the course. Furthermore, engaging in academic discussions among critical pedagogues in the similar education contexts can also be helpful for teachers to develop a sense of community or solidarity and further collaborative practices, which can be particularly beneficial (or even essential) to implementing such initiatives.

6.2 Focus on and be prepared for teachable moments for overt instruction

The second principle is closely linked to one of the four factors (or pedagogical strategies) that constitute multiliteracies pedagogy: overt instruction. 5 According to the New London Group (1996), in a multiliteracies learning process, teachers need to provide active interventions at “teachable” moments to help students to gain conscious awareness and control over what is being learned and how it is learned. Through meaningful interactions with teachers (or experts), students can denaturalize some of the taken‐for‐granted social and cultural beliefs and practices, which may have negative impact on their life, thereby opening them up for further critique and challenge.

The results of this case study actually demonstrate that, in retrospect, there were a great number of teachable moments in which the author, Korean teacher, could have more meaningfully intervened in her students' learning and reasoning processes—thereby engaging the students in more reflective and critical dialogues about language, culture, and educational and social issues of inequality. For example, in Sue's case, it might have been useful for the teacher to more proactively identify teachable moments for initiating discussion about the meaning and the importance of “native speakers' English” (and different natives' and non‐natives' accents) on intercultural communication practices. Furthermore, rather than simply imposing new classroom norms (e.g., being active and speaking up) on students, it might have been more fruitful, at the beginning of the course, to have open conversations with them about their personal aims of learning the English language, their perceptions of the value of doing so for their life, and the norms that are desirable in the course. In this way, the notion of multiliteracies could be more effectively and meaningfully introduced to, and unpacked by, the students themselves. At the same time, establishing a shared understanding of the fact that there is a great diversity among class members—in terms of their reasons for learning English, the values of English language for their personal life, and their current level of English communicative competence—could be a strong basis for seeding ongoing discussions about some of the social issues of inequality that become evident throughout the course.

Using such overt instruction strategies seeks to engage students not only in their own learning processes but also in the teacher's teaching or classroom management processes. Doing so can be also promising in this particular pedagogical context where the teacher tends to face various challenges that are less common in the regular EFL classrooms and whose solutions might therefore not from the part of their established repertoire. For example, when the government of Iran prohibited the public (including the Iranian students in the course) from accessing the YouTube site, the author could have invited her Korean students to discuss that event, through which the students may be able to think about important notions such as freedom of expression and the censorship of media. In addition, inviting them to become part of the problem‐solving process—to figure out how to share the videos with Iranian students and have a further discussion with them—would have helped the students to become more active participants and potentially reduced the teacher's burden of implementing the course. We have already seen some meaningful changes in the earlier case of Han who led the classroom practices of using global search engines.

Another critical teachable moment that might be seen as inviting the teacher to more directly intervene arose when students were forming the groups for their collaborative media projects. That intervention might focus on the equal distribution of cultural capital: the distribution not only of linguistic competence but also of other skills that the students have into the five groups. Explicit discussion about possible ways of forming the groups so that everyone might have more meaningful and potentially fair learning experiences within course might be also useful in such a situation—useful not only for group formation but for encouraging students to reflect upon their subsequent actions within the groups.

It would be a challenging task for teachers to intervene in students' learning at all the right moments throughout the course without the benefit of hindsight. That is because of the organic nature of this course, which does not have a fixed curriculum that prescribes what and how knowledge and skills need to be transmitted to students and the sensitive and political nature of the topics (e.g., social and cultural issues). Therefore, in conjunction with what the first principle suggests, it is necessary for teachers to be prepared for those teachable moments by developing their own cultural and social awareness, appropriately sensitive yet effective language for articulating and unpacking different issues of inequality, and pedagogical strategies to engage students in critical dialogues without excluding anyone or any group in the classroom.

6.3 Create new discourses, norms, and teacher language

The fundamental aim of critical pedagogy is to empower students to challenge and deconstruct dominant discourses (i.e., legitimate knowledge, rules, and subjectivities) and so, ultimately, to denaturalize and disrupt unequal social or institutional structures and power relations. Similarly, in multiliteracies pedagogy, students are expected to transform cultural practices: through participating in personally meaningful multiliteracies practices and through critically examining their own practices in relation to larger social and cultural contexts. The implication is that teachers, as transformative intellectuals, need to create—or at least contribute to creating—new discourses and norms in their school settings.

The third principle focuses on how teachers in the course can approach and fulfil this seemingly challenging and overwhelming task within their classroom teaching praxis. The most essential condition for teachers when approaching this challenge is that they are critical about their own pedagogical beliefs which are, inevitably, to some extent influenced by the dominant discourses in their social, historical, and educational contexts. In particular, when it comes to the construction of students' subjectivities (and their own subjectivities as a teacher), the teacher should strive to avoid asking simple questions such as “who is a good or bad student?” or “who is active or passive?” Instead, an attempt should be made to ask more critical questions such as “who may be perceived as a good or bad student?”, “why or why not?”, or “who may benefit or be disadvantaged by the assessment criteria in operation?” Asking those questions may effectively reveal, at least to teachers themselves, some of the hidden social mechanisms of schooling that serve to reproduce hegemonic power relationships among students with unequal socio‐economic status.

At the practice level, then, teachers can use this insight as one basis for critically evaluating the dominant forms of classroom language, which often contain common sense assumptions about schooling, teaching, learning, achievement, teacher–student relations, and so forth (Giroux, 1988). Language is not a value‐free or neutral instrument, which simply conveys individual users' ideas or objectively represents social realities. Instead, it is both a value‐laden political product and a tool, which mostly serves dominant cultural groups by circulating and reinforcing certain social beliefs and by influencing and changing people's thoughts and behaviours (see Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). Therefore, teacher's classroom language needs to be an object of critical examination, through which teachers can continuously revisit and revise one's pedagogical beliefs and assumptions. Based on the examination, teachers need to create a new set of classroom languages and norms to make their own teaching practices more inclusive. In particular, it may be necessary for teachers in the current multicultural or globalized educational contexts where the diversity of student body is increasing, to have multiple sets of classroom languages and norms in an attempt to accommodate diverse student needs. In the CMIC course, for example, utilizing different sets of criteria to facilitate and evaluate students' learning might be required in the different student cases discussed in the previous section.

Teachers' critical examination can open up, in turn, the possibility for involving students in critical reflection about their own developing subjectivities. It can be beneficial for students to be invited to reflect on the construction of their own subjectivities (i.e., identities) as part of the course interactions. Those subjectivities in such courses might include being an “EFL learner,” an “English speaker,” a “career developer,” and a “traveller,” and the open discussion of those issues implicates both their own personal motivation and the more collective issue of what it means to be a good or bad student (or English speaker). In this case, the diverse discourses that the students bring into classroom discussions can be organically fed into teacher's languages. Doing so may more effectively guide the adoption of the CMIC in language education in a more pedagogically, socially, and culturally sensitive way.