Cultural Tasks for Digital Language Learning

Explaining how the cultural practices of a community can be used as the vehicle for learning its language, this book shows how two apps have been developed to deliver language learning while users are carrying out real-life cultural activities.

Many people are motivated to learn foreign languages by their interest in foreign cultures, cuisines and activities such as origami, Hallowe’en pumpkins or cooking a meal from the target culture. This book shows how these motivations can be integrated into the way we learn languages using the latest digital technology: the Linguacuisine and ENACT apps.

Written by experts in education, educational technology and applied linguistics, the book introduces the concept of the cultural task and provides a model, principles and procedures, enabling professionals in any area – including teachers and community workers – to adapt the apps to their own environment. Video tutorials on the accompanying website give users a hands-on introduction to using the apps and authoring their own cultural tasks in their own language for use by others. As such, the apps constitute a rich online repository of Open Educational Resources (OERs).

The chapters offer in-depth descriptions of how the apps were implemented in 5 different countries, with 9 different languages and cultures, and clear research evidence of the learning of cultural practices and languages through varied data sources including photographs of app use and cultural artefacts produced by users.

The editors won the 2025 ReCALL Annual Article Prize for their article Migrants’ digital skills development: Engaging with and creating digital cultural activities on the ENACT web app.