Caroline Steel

Language Students and Their Technologies: Charting the Evolution 2006-2011.

This paper has two key objectives. Firstly, it seeks to record the technologies in current use by learners of a range of languages at an Australian university in 2011. Data was collected via a large-scale survey of 587 foreign language students across ten languages at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Notably the data differentiates between those technologies that students used inside and outside of formal classrooms as well as recording particular technologies and applications that students perceived as beneficial to their language learning. Secondly, this study aims to compare and contrast its findings with those from two previous studies that collected data on students’ use of technologies five years earlier, in 2006, in the UK and Canada. The intention is to chart major developments and changes that have occurred during the intervening five-year period, between 2006 and 2011. The data reported in two studies, one by Conole (2008) and one by Peters, Weinberg and Sarma (2008) are used as points of reference for the comparison with the present study. The findings of the current study point to the autonomy and independence of the language learners in this cohort and the re-emergence of CALL tools, both for in-class and out-of-class learning activities. According to this data set, learners appear to have become more autonomous and independent and much more able to shape and resource their personal language learning experience in a blended learning setting. The students also demonstrate a measure of sophistication in their use of online tools, such that they are able to work around known limitations and constraints. In other words, the students have a keen awareness of the affordances of the technologies they are using.

Enhancing problem-based learning designs with a single e-learning scaffolding tool: Two case studies using Challenge FRAP

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a powerful instructional approach. By working through assessable complex problem-solving tasks learners can be encouraged to actively engage in investigation and inquiry and to use high level cognitive thought processes to solve real-life problems in professional contexts. A critical element of a successful PBL design is the inclusion of instructional support, such as scaffolding, to guide and assist the learner through the reasoning process that is crucial to successful problem-solving. The e-learning tool ‘Challenge FRAP’ (Form for the Recording of the Analysis of Problems) is client-based public domain authoring software which facilitates the use of scaffolding, the provision of progressive feedback and can promote student reflection at key decision-making points. This paper illustrates the benefits of such an e-learning scaffolding tool through two PBL case studies; one group-based PBL task in science and technology and one self-directed PBL task in plant pathology.

Enabling Effective Mobile Language Learning: Students’ Perspectives, Wants and Needs

This chapter presents learner perspectives on the pedagogical use of commercial mobile learning applications for acquiring Asian and European languages at an Australian university. It contributes to this book by addressing one of the key organising questions: What are the different ways of conceptualising, identifying and evaluating mobile learning initiatives in higher education in the region? Specifically, it utilises the student perspective from the ‘pedagogical’ level of the Mobile Learning Evaluation Framework, whereby students were co-partners in an inquiry that focused on evaluating how mobile devices and applications could be used for learning foreign languages. It aims to build a better understanding of students’ emerging mobile learning practices and preferences in the Asia-Pacific region through learners’ own evaluations and experiential accounts in learner-determined contexts. Over three iterations of an undergraduate class (2011–2013), language students selected and actively evaluated current and emerging technologies for their potential for assisting language acquisition. Simultaneously, students were encouraged to gain pedagogical intelligence (Hutchings, 2005) about themselves as learners and how they were taught languages. Increasingly, students selected mobile devices and commercial applications as the focus of their evaluations. In pairs or individually, 63 students created a total of 36 radio-style podcasts to share their discoveries with language teachers. Approximately 25% of these students were from Asian countries such as China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. This chapter presents the perspectives of regionally diverse and pedagogically intelligent learners on enabling effective mobile language learning. Their wants, needs and recommendations are summarised for institutions, teachers, learners and mobile learning application developers in the Asia-Pacific region who are seeking to enable effective mobile learning.