This project provides me with an opportunity of looking at the learning process as a designer. In this new-old setting, teachers and students become users, a process of studying resources contributes to information architecture, a student-centered approach backs up the human-centered design, an educational method turns into a digital product, and the organized learning with digital tools turns into the human-centered design process that is supposed to be cycled, tested and measured repeatedly.
While those and other elements and characteristics of education remain the same no matter how they are labelled, a designer’s angle feels less personal, objective, and mathematical, though as a teacher and researcher I dealt with numbers, not humans, quite often. In the role of a designer, I will try to unite this pragmatism and new terminology with my pedagogical and technological knowledges and experiences to get something unique – attractive, understandable, operable, effective and efficient, useful and usable etc. method of studying English, most suitable for my users.
The goal is to create a system of English Facebook – mature ESL students’ interaction activities in two steps: (1). studying recent academic resources on Facebook and on teaching English as a second language (ESL) to mature students, and (2). combining current pedagogical, technological, sociological, psychological, economical, and linguistic findings with my own ideas and personal experiences as a teacher, researcher, and a Facebook user.
According to Issa and Isaias (2015), a modern human-computer interaction should be involving, diverse in knowledge and expertise, and iterative (p. 25); efficient, effective and safe (p. 24). They recommend a designer to work with the user since the very beginning of a tool development “to make the system more successful” (p. 38). In my case, I communicated with the users before I started developing a system of online activities for them.
I chose a specific contingent – older Canadian immigrants who do not know English very well. Being settled down, these people seem stuck with their low level of English: they already built their own non-English circle of communication, they cannot make new English-speaking friends easily and have no time or energy to start studying English properly. I intent to change their English language situation for the better at their leisure time.
I am centering on older people because they seem underrepresented in pedagogy and methodology of teaching foreign languages. Academic works on mature students are rare and not up-to-date (Martin-Lynch, Merrill, Laming, Parr) despite the growing numbers of these students in the universities and colleges worldwide. Meanwhile, most contemporary books and articles about Facebook focus on problems of privacy, democracy and addiction (Andrews, Fietkiewicz, Hartman, Lins, Rife, Wanner, Wittig). Exposing social dangers of Facebook is important, but in this study, I would like to highlight the benefits of Facebook. There are several modern resources on Facebook in the ESL high school and college classroom available (Dorji, Rajagopal, Shah), with some authors even doubting usability of Facebook for older people (Saeed et al., 2014), but I am pretty optimistic about the positive outcomes.
For now, my project users’ will participate in this project indirectly – through me as the representative of mature ESL students in Canada. If I can, I will engage real people to take part in this pedagogical-technological experiment.
My users’ requirements are simple – they want to learn English quickly and easily. While I cannot help them with “quickly”, I expect advance with “easily”.
I do not believe that English Facebook will help mature international learners much with English grammar or pronunciation. I see Facebook first of all as a practice field for English conversational phrases and sentences, reading and writing. Topics like “Greeting”, “Leavetaking”, “Dis/Approval”, “Compliment”, “Dis/Agreement”, “Dis/Like”, “Gratitude”, “Surprise” etc. seem ideal for fast utilization there. However, I can be mistaken in my assumptions as Facebook is full of audio content too, and therefore, can be beneficial for English listening and speaking as well. I am not sure of the role Facebook plays in transferring new culture either and therefore, would love to consult with my colleagues on the topic of Facebook usability.
I expect the following difficulties and limitations of the project: not every elder person uses Facebook; those who use this social network quite often do not consider it an appropriate place for learning; not everything can be studied through organized Facebook-user interaction; no one is checking factual and linguistic accuracy of a Facebook content; older people are curious, but inflexible in their habits, and if they try a new approach, it will take time for them to change their Facebook routine etc.
I suppose that the following factors might contribute to the project’s success: a great number of older people on Facebook; easiness of use of the suggested method; my very high professional status in the non-English speaking community.
Regarding the way to evaluate the project, in the end I expect my mature ESL learners to spend more time on English Facebook communicating with their peers. I believe this criterion – time on English Facebook – will be telling in terms of users’ preference and performance.
As I consider the universal usability of Facebook as an ESL tool and environment, I remember older people from Ukraine who recently travelled to Canada for protection. So far, 141,694 Ukrainian applications for Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel have been approved (Government of Canada, 2022). In the popular Ukrainian Facebook groups “Ukrainians in Toronto Group”, “Ukrainian Moms in Toronto”, “Українці допомагають з роботою / Канада” etc. those travellers are asking for free offline English courses in Canada. Little do they know about a possibility of studying English on Facebook individually, and I do not blame them as the concept of online learning in a free time has come to me only recently. I hope the final result of the project will be applicable to those displaced Ukrainians too, so putative user identities will be more diverse. All in all, I expect this project to have a great social value and importance.
Reference
Andrews, L. (2020). Facebook, the media and democracy: Big tech, small state? Routledge.
Dorji, J. (2021). Facebook: An online environment for learning English for ESL students. The Journal of Asia TEFL, 18(2), 608-616. http://dx.doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2021.18.2.14.608
Fietkiewicz, K. J., & Lins, E. (2016). New media and new territories for European law: Competition in the market for social networking services. In K. Knautz, & K. S. Baran (Eds), Facets of Facebook: Use and users (pp.285-324). De Gruyter.
Hartmann, S., & Wanner, B. (2016). Does Facebook cause addiction? An analysis of German Facebook users. In K. Knautz, & K. S. Baran (Eds), Facets of Facebook: Use and users (pp.72-91). De Gruyter.
Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Sustainable design: Hci, usability and environmental concerns. Springer. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4471-6753-2.pdf
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