Teaching/learning a language: Some considerations on roles and paradigms in the digital age

This paper is part of an ongoing study that aims to investigate the role of (e)motivation in relation to empowerment in teaching/learning English L2 in global contexts where the impact of the marketisation of academic knowledge, prompted by new epistemological and educational paradigms (see Weik 2014; Peter, Fanghanel 2016) can be observed in the promotion of customised courses fitting in with the demands of the job market, identification of cross-curricular and interdisciplinary learning pathways, and teaching/learning English in many national university environments where English is not the official language. With this in mind, the focus of the present investigation is on the roles of learner and teacher and paradigms of education in the digital age. It opens with reflections on the guidelines set up in EU and UN documents mainly as regards the social dimension of languages and then moves on to an exploration of the conditions to meet the demands required to fulfil roles in society.