THE DESIGN AND CREATION OF AN ELECTRONIC LANGUAGE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR GREEK AS FOREIGN/SECOND LANGUAGE

This paper outlines an electronic language learning environment that was created for the teaching/learning of Greek as a second or foreign language. It was designed to enable the teaching and learning of the Greek language and history among pupils (K-12) who attend various forms of Greek-language education worldwide. This European Union- and Greek-state-funded project, run by the Centre of Migration and Intercultural Studies of the University of Crete and supervised by the Greek Ministry of Education, is designed to combine language learning with language use. In the environment, learners and teachers can: (a) engage in interactive and multimodal learning tasks promoting language learning by choosing their language level (A1 to B2) and (b) become part of a Community of Learning through global learning networks or "sister-classes". In this way, learners are able to use what they have learned in the environment in order to: (a) communicate, synchronously and asynchronously with the learners in their sister-class (b) take part in collaborative activities that promote creativity and metacognition. Likewise, learners can refer back to the interactive and multimodal learning tasks in the environment when they are in need of language prompts. This paper will provide evidence of how this environment uses a variety of pedagogical orientations and theories in order to create the conditions for L2 learning and L2 use.