Commentary: the promise of digital scholarship in SLA research and language pedagogy.

Although digital scholarship is now well established in academia, there is no consensus about how it should be evaluated for tenure and promotion. Is digital publication acceptable as a way to disseminate research? Is the digital medium appropriate for conducting research? To what degree does creating digital materials--from research instruments to pedagogical materials--advance knowledge and thereby constitute scholarship? Recent calls for open access to scholarship (i.e., free publication and dissemination) through digital media (see Chanier, 2007) are stimulating a debate that hinges on just such questions. In that debate, departments holding traditional views hesitate to recognize digital media as scholarship while others hold that digital media promises to enrich scholarly exchanges.

In 2001, the Modern Language Association entered the controversy by offering its Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages (MLA, 2001). These Guidelines are the work of the Committee on Information Technology, formerly the MLA Committee on Computers and Emerging Technologies in Teaching and Research. They aim to help departments achieve an informed perspective on this new scholarly medium. In this commentary, I offer additional thoughts to the debate by considering (a) how digital media necessitates a redefinition of scholarship in second language acquisition (SLA) research and language pedagogy, (b) what criteria might be used in evaluating digital scholarship, and (c) how digital media enhances and accelerates SLA scholarship beyond the possibilities of print publication.

Redefining Scholarship

The MLA Guidelines broaden the notion of text to consider research presented in digital form, in addition to research published in print. Digital texts often include images and sounds as well as words. They open new venues for scholarly exchange, which push the borders of scholarship. Blogs, bulletin boards, and listservs are now the site of considerable academic discussion, replacing to some extent the function of editorials and responses or comments in scholarly journals, which appear less frequently than in years past.

In addition to expanding the parameters of what constitutes scholarship, the MLA Guidelines also redefine authorial roles and the notion of ownership by recognizing and supporting collaboration in interdisciplinary teams involving technical experts. This allowance for collaborative authorship moves the professional one step farther from its heavy reliance on the single-authored monograph as the gold standard route up the academic ladder (MLA, 2006). In SLA research, we have relied on co-authorship for some time now. For example, in The Modern Language Journal, which I edited for 14 years, it is now more common to find co-authors or multiple-author teams than it is to find articles by single authors. This trend developed steadily over my editorship, in line with the growing interdisciplinary nature of research. Co-authors often include teams of established scholars and young scholars or graduate students, along with statisticians, who provide technical expertise in handling the research data. In a parallel fashion, it would seem highly appropriate in digital scholarship to expect authorship teams to include co-authors who provide technical expertise.

For language teaching materials, co-authorship is even more common than in SLA research. Major textbooks have many components, the majority of which are now digital (e.g., websites, electronic workbooks, companion electronic textbooks, interactive exercises, guided chat rooms, and blogs.). As a textbook co-author, Paroles from Wiley (Magnan, Martin-Berg, Berg, & Ozzello, 2006), I can attest to the dangers of having technology authors from outside the field prepare these materials without input from the main authors of the text. Authors need as much or more expertise in SLA to prepare digital materials--with their rich interlacing of print, visual, and aural material--than even to create the print textbook. Materials need to be selected and sequenced according to principles of second language learning, which relates them to SLA research. In fact, as Swaffar and Arens (2005) point out, the multimodes of digital materials reflect the multimodes of language learning. The social turn in SLA research leads us to believe that languages are best learned by a combination of talking, hearing, reading, and writing, that is, through all types of interactions inherent with involvement in social communities (cf., Hall, 2001, for example). It would be counter-intuitive to restrict pedagogical materials to a single mode of communication. Digital materials are needed, in addition to print materials.

Over 20 years ago the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Foreign Language Programs (AAUSC) issued a statement urging institutions to value language textbooks in the scholarly dossiers of SLA researchers. This recommendation appears also in the 2006 MLA Task Force report. It is no longer unusual for a department to include textbook authorship as a substantial part of a dossier for tenure and promotion. It is a logical and necessary step to include digital pedagogical materials as well.

Evaluating Digital Scholarship

As the MLA Guidelines rightly point out, the criteria for evaluating digital scholarship must center on academic peer review. This process helps separate out quick listserv or blog postings from more carefully crafted and vetted remarks. Peer review is required for publication in many digital venues, including Language Learning & Technology; in terms of scholarly value, these venues should be treated no differently from referred print publication. In fact, might we not attribute more academic value to a peer reviewed contribution in an online journal than to a monograph published by a vanity press? The MLA has recognized the declining number of outlets for publishing scholarly books, which led the organization to urge departments to rethink the dominance of the monograph, to promote scholarly essays and portfolios, and to recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media (MLA, 2006). The rigor of the selection process is more important in determining the merit of a publication than its physical nature.

Given that co-authorship is becoming the norm, it is important to understand the contributions of each author to the final publication. This information should be made available to academic promotion committees; perhaps it should also appear with each publication in a brief note.

Another criterion for determining scholarly worth is contribution to the profession. To estimate the impact of an author's work, departments have traditionally relied on reviews of a monograph and on circulation and acceptance rates of journals. With digital media, the task is much easier. For web sites, the number of hits is a common measure. For electronic journal publication, editors receive information on how many times each article has been downloaded; in principle, these figures could be made available to authors. Digital databases track citations and use them to determine impact factors of journals, which many presses consider more reliable measures of readership than circulation figures. It is true that print circulation is declining as libraries enter consortia to purchase large numbers of journals, offering them online to library users, who often access them from home. Through such consortia arrangements, the number of readers increases dramatically. For example, in 2004, Blackwell Publishing estimated digital access for The Modern Language Journal at over 135,000 readers (Magnan, 2006), whereas print copies of the journals numbered under 5,000.

Given the greater academic reach of digital media, it is logical to consider its contribution to the profession as equal to--or actually greater than--that of print publication. The journal Language Teaching is looking to publish some conference papers as podcasts to make them available sooner than would be possible in print. We are likely in the future to see the scholarly monograph disseminated in PDF format. Swiftness and cost of publication drive this innovation. Will disciplines remain open to such changing measures of academic value while keeping standards strong?

Chanier (2007) pointed to a journal's impact factor as a way to measure the stature of a publication. Impact factors are not well understood and are relatively easy to manipulate. An impact factor for a journal considers the number of citations appearing in the literature from a journal in proportion to the number of articles the journal has published that year. This number is ranked relative to the counts for other journals. The more citations there are over a fixed period of time, the higher the impact factor. In this system, one article that is widely cited drives up the impact factor. Editors are thus encouraged by their publishers to include survey and state-of-the-art papers, which will be cited in all future articles addressing the topic, as well as to publish special issues early in the volume year to give them time to be cited extensively. If the impact factor is to become a primary criterion for evaluating scholarly work, authors, like editors, will learn to manipulate it by shaping the type of work they produce and when they schedule it to appear. The impact factor is thus not as impartial as a blind peer review, although it does involve the profession as a whole rather than a few individual scholars.