Paradoxical paradigm proposals - Learning languages in mobile societies

Abstract

The concept of paradigms gives us the capacity to look analytically at historical scientific and intellectual episodes in a broader framework. It does however potentially also give us the capacity to look more analytically at contemporary scientific and intellectual activity and make conjectures and predictions. This paper looks at various contemporary pedagogic paradigms, including language learning and mobile learning, and suggests both their failings and then their replacement by an over-arching pedagogic paradigm more suited to societies permeated by personal digital technologies. This might be called the mobility, learning and language paradigm. The paper uses these examples as a way of exploiting paradigmatic thinking in order to catalyse intellectual progress.