TaiwanCALL 2025 International Conference
Organized by TaiwanCALL Association (formerly as PPTELL), Providence University,
and National Science and Technology Council
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Keynote Speakers
National Taichung University of Education
Meei-Ling Liaw is a Full Professor and the founding Chair of the English Department at National Taichung University of Education in Taiwan. She previously taught at Tunghai University, where she served as the founding Director of the Teacher Education Program and as Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature from 2003 to 2005. She received the Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship in 2000 and 2008, and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include intercultural learning, reading, teacher education, and computer-assisted language learning (CALL). From 2013 to 2018, she served as Chief Editor of the Taiwan ESP Journal and is currently an Associate Editor for Language Learning & Technology. She served as President of TaiwanCALL (formerly PPTELL) from 2022 to 2024.
Virtual Exchanges, Real Impacts: A Pedagogical Journey in Telecollaborative Language Education
Over the past three decades, intercultural telecollaboration—now widely known as virtual exchange (VE)—has evolved from simple email exchanges to immersive, multimodal, and AI-assisted environments. This keynote traces the longitudinal development of telecollaborative practices within the field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL), highlighting how evolving technologies have shaped pedagogical approaches, learner identities, and teacher roles.
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Drawing on both global and Taiwanese scholarly contributions, I will reflect on the shifting landscape of VE through the lens of my own research trajectory, from early cross-cultural email projects in the 1990s to current investigations involving virtual reality (VR), teacher identity, and multimodal inter(action) analysis. The speech will
showcase how Taiwanese CALL researchers have played an important role in advancing intercultural communication, digital storytelling, and pre-service teacher development in diverse sociocultural contexts.
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By revisiting key milestones in telecollaborative research and practice, the talk will address enduring challenges—such as equity, accessibility, and teacher mediation— while proposing future directions that integrate immersive technologies and ethical AI design. Ultimately, this keynote invites language educators and researchers to view VE not just as a digital innovation, but as a sustained pedagogical ethos grounded in empathy, agency, and intercultural understanding.