Collaborative Ubiquitous Learning and Multimodal Communication in English Language Courses: A Systematic Review

Introduction And Literature Review

English Language (EL) education entails a communicative approach, so that undergraduate and postgraduate higher education learners are trained in the (co-) construction of current knowledge-on-demand that they must research, process and build through various tasks and multimodal forms of communication and technologies (Barton & Ryan, 2014; Clouet, 2013; García-Sánchez, 2012). The (co-)construction of digital knowledge should, therefore, address both a local and global comparative ecosystem, supported by Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and multimodal collaborative ubiquitous learning (Burbules, 2009; García-Sánchez & Luján-García, 2016; May & Saitta, 2010). Today, EL courses should be designed under a collaborative ubiquitous learning (CUL) approach that participates in lifelong formal and informal learning with access to worldwide information anywhere and at anytime, so that “participants can adopt an interdependent knowledge-building role with the team members” (García-Sánchez, 2017, p. 58), either for the purpose of learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

In applied linguistics, EL education is in constant transformation. It has been challenged by onsite and offsite settings, and ubiquitous computing technologies that must pursue a communicative and interactive approach in higher education for learners to achieve not only new literacies but also new ubiquitous knowledge (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Looi et al., 2016). The design of EL courses under CUL is therefore supported by the development of cognitive, metacognitive and motivational abilities, which, at the same time, must help learners to mediate international communication and face forthcoming professional scenarions in which quite probably English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and/or ESP are used to engage with other colleagues (Clouet, 2021; García-Sánchez, 2022; Jenkins, 2013; Lin et al., 2021).

The scales of a CUL ecosystem foster collective knowledge building, multimodal communication, motivation, peer-to-peer feedback, and decision making, among others. This CUL environment also implies that each participant interdependently contributes to a common task. To do so, learners must have developed their self-efficacy skills first so that they can successfully compromise with collaborating with others (García-Sánchez, 2017). Consequently, this CUL process participates in enhancing what Cope and Kalantzis called “multiliteracies” (2009) and multimodal communication that allows current EL learners to share different semiotic modes (verbal, non-verbal, visual, written and auditory communication) so that a topic of their professional or scientific field is successfully explored and communicated (Clouet, 2021; García-Sánchez, 2021; Morell, 2015; Nouri, 2019). In this CUL scenario, multimodal communication is key so that different modes or forms of communication (spoken language, non-verbal communication, posture, eye-contact, written language, and visuals, for instance) are used to express messages (Jewitt, 2013; Kress, 2010).

With this context in mind, the systematic review presented here aims at analyzing the existing research based on the eligibility criteria (collaborative ubiquitous learning, multimodal and English language courses in higher education). First, a quantitative review of the academic literature in the Web of Science and Scopus databases from 1995 to 2022 is explored to analyze the most relevant studies in the field. Second, a qualitative approach is examined to discover the latest research concerning collaborative ubiquitous learning scenarios, multimodal communication and English language courses in higher education. The two research questions, therefore, are: