Corrigendum: Ethnocultural empathy development of future language teachers through digital multiliteracy resources for low-literacy adult migrants.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1398457.].

Ethnocultural empathy development of future language teachers through digital multiliteracy resources for low-literacy adult migrants.

The increasingly digital and multicultural 21st-century society requires future teachers to be prepared for the changes and challenges they may encounter. Not only language and digital competences, but critical-thinking and problem-solving skills are needed. Moreover, well developed socio-affective abilities, empathy among them, are also key when dealing with others. This is even more relevant when teachers are to work with a non-mainstream population, such as adult migrants with low literacy levels, and to design student-centered curricula or activities. Empathy is a multifaceted process involving, among others, perception, intellection, affect and other sensory aspects of the lived experience. It has been argued that the first-person perspective-taking involved in empathic engagement must necessarily involve rational computation and cognitively mediated processing. Training future teachers in the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies is a means to integrate multimodal digital instruction and aggregate cognitive as well as socio-emotional features to the education of future language teachers. Method: A mixed-method pre-post study was conducted with 48 trainee teachers who participated in stand-alone digital multiliteracy interventions, in which they were encouraged to envisage themselves as future teachers of low-literate migrants. Policy documents such as the reference guide on Literacy and Second Language Learning for the Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants, journal articles, audiovisual resources as well as examples of existing educational materials aimed at the target audience, were made available to them on an online platform. In two separate studies, trainees were encouraged to collaboratively produce two different multimodal outputs. The Revised Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy was administered before and after the intervention, subjecting the data obtained to quantitative analysis. Qualitative data was also collected to gain a better understanding of the affective and cognitive processes experienced by the participants. Results: Simple statistical analysis coupled with the comparison of means was used to respond to the research questions. Statistical hypothesis testing, including correlations and non-parametric statistics were used to analyze the relationship between each of the factors within the RSEE and the participants, considering the different interventions applied. Non-parametric tests (U-Mann Whitney) were used to compare the differences between the levels of ethnocultural empathy of the participants in the two studies. Significant differences were found in Factor 3 (Empathy) and Factor 5 (Anxiety) between the groups and their post-intervention results, with a p value of 0.053 and 0.038, respectively. The effect size r was calculated, obtaining a size effect of 0.625 for Factor 3 (Empathy) and 0.674 for Factor 5 (Anxiety). These results indicate that the significant differences and the size effect between both groups are large. U-Mann Whitney non-parametric analysis also revealed gender differences in Factor 3 (Empathy), showing females higher levels than males. Effect size r analysis showed a large size effect of 0.708 for Factor 3 (Empathy). The findings pertaining to gender-related differences in empathy levels confirm the conclusions drawn by previous studies. When contrasting study 1 and 2, statistical differences were also shown after the intervention for the 'Anxiety and Lack of Multicultural Self-efficacy' factor. The qualitative data analysis was carried out with Atlas.ti v.8, in order to isolate and categorize the broader themes and the most significant explanatory quotes extracted from the participants' records and interviews. The results reveal the learning strategies that each group of learners applied to successfully complete the task at hand, as well as the participants' deployment of their critical thinking skills and the awakening of a sense of awareness of their own professional competence development process. Conclusion: This study set out to compare how effective two digital multiliteracy interventions were in developing future language teachers' ethnocultural empathy and cognitive abilities when appraising the educational needs of low-literacy migrants. Despite the small sample size, the study certainly adds to our understanding of the impact of multimodal tasks involving critical thinking skills on trainees' cognitive and affective abilities. Besides, it expands the growing body of research that points to the desirability of embedding digitally-based content creation tasks in training curricula for future language teachers.

A Music-Mediated Language Learning Experience: Students' Awareness of Their Socio-Emotional Skills.

In a society where mobility, globalization and contact with people from other cultures have become its distinctive traits, the enhancement of plurilingualism and intercultural understanding should be of the utmost concern. From a positive psychology perspective, agency is the human capacity to affect other people positively or negatively through one's actions. This agentic vision can be related to mediation, a concept rooted in socio-cultural learning theory, where social interaction is considered a fundamental cornerstone in the development of cognition. These social interactions in the language learning setting may be facilitated through musical activities due to their social bonding effect. This paper tries to offer insights into how a music-mediated experience in language learning may develop students' interpersonal and collaborative competences to become active members of a more inclusive society. Mediation, considered to be a paradigm shift in the foreign language classroom and for different out-of-class language learning possibilities, could also provide an environment where learners maximize their emotional intelligence. Our paper focuses on this paradigm shift spearheaded by the Common European Framework for Languages Companion Volume (CEFR/CV) and the considerable repercussions it is bound to have for foreign language didactics, as cooperative tasks become central to foreign language learning. We hypothesize that mediated language learning experiences (MeLLEs) imply a socio-emotional change in learners, focusing on the others, on their needs and interests, by trying to help them understand texts, concepts or facilitating communication with their peers. An intervention with a music-MeLLE was designed and implemented in an L2 classroom of adult learners with divergent backgrounds. A self-assessment scale with mediation descriptors and the socio-emotional expertise scale (SEE) were administered. Results show that students become more mindful of their strengths, and of their capacity for collaboration and teamwork. This leads to more awareness of their mediation skills. Students' mediation skills correlate significantly with their socio-emotional skills - specifically with their expressivity. The implementation of a music-mediated experience also promoted tolerance and enhanced learners' intrinsic motivations for language learning at the same time as acknowledging their diversity.