Originally posted by Kate Quinn on June 8, 2018
Many of you have likely experienced teaching content (math, science, graphic design) to English Language Learners (ELLs). Many ELLs are concerned with the time it takes to learn a language; traditional ESL classes can be expensive and unrelated to students’ ultimate academic or professional goals. Studying like this “often leads to frustration as learners feel they have been studying ‘for years’ without making much progress” (linked resource, p. 5). In 2013/14, researchers at The Open University published Mobile education for English language teaching: a guide for teachers in order to explore how Mobile Assisted Language Learning might bridge the gap between ‘Academic’ and ‘Applied’ English language skills.
What I like about this article is the pedagogical framework for MALL and its connection to practical classroom activities; the authors give examples of at least nine classroom activities that can incorporate mobile devices into learning applied language, such as ‘Make a multimodal group dictionary’ and ‘Create a digital story or ‘how-to’ guide’. It also cautions teachers about the negative aspects of mobile use: privacy, differences in data or storage between mobiles, and similar functions between students’ phones. Most importantly, activities can move out of the classroom and happen in public places where students are naturally immersed in English.
Though the resource is half a decade old (which can be a lifetime in The Mobile World!), the framework encourages teachers to integrate mobile into the classroom without focusing on new, flashy toys … though there is a very useful resource of apps for language learning in the Appendix.
As a teacher of ESL, I’m thrilled to have found such a useful OER. I’d encourage anyone working with ELLs to read this and to consider the MALL framework.
I found this to be a very interesting paradigm for language learning. We now also have immersive language apps like Duolingo(https://www.duolingo.com) and Rosetta Stone(https://www.rosettastone.com) which can support language learning, but the intentional shift of language learning out of the classroom with the use of mobile devices to access resources and classroom community seems an exemplary model of Mobile Education. As I serve at an international school, the challenges of second and third-language learners is constant and underlies all learning.
As I found this area interesting, I dug a little deeper, I found a paper on the use of mobile devices along with an intentionally informal social media styled language learning environment where they theorized that increased intentionality as well as the informal nature of the learning environment influenced their findings of increased use of less frequent words (Wong et al., 2016). What I noted as well was the potential for increased autonomy and ownership of learning for the students as they were making the decision on what language to use and how in a familiar context.
I see a lot of potential for the use of mobile devices to meaningfully extend the language learning classroom into different contexts in this way.
References:
Wong, L. H., King, R. B., Chai, C. S., & Liu, M. (2016). Seamlessly learning Chinese: contextual meaning making and vocabulary growth in a seamless Chinese as a second language learning environment. Instructional Science, 44(5), 399–422. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9383-z