Ecological CALL: development of a self-location tool for attuning to the ‘chorus of voices’

Abstract

This study reports on the development of Parlure Games and explores its pedagogical affordances. Parlure Games is a multi-dialectal listening and decolonial conversation tool created to address the absence of variable speech (including speech markers associated with native speaker status, regional dialect, age, and race) found in the audiovisual material of adult French learners in Montréal, Canada. Parlure Games enables instructors to curate audiovisual content inclusive of different social and regional dialects, and supports learners in understanding variable speech while self-locating themselves in the process of learning a colonial language.