Week 4

Week 4 has again been a bit more laid back, with a continued break from other courses. I've successfully reached all my goals thus far and am very confident I will reach my final goals by the end of next week!

Again this week I will discuss some connections to course content followed by evaluating my progress using my technologies. The course content this week was especially catered to my challenge as it was focussed on Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). This is by far my favourite ‘ALL’ so far as it directly links with active learning of French vocabulary and grammar. The push/pull concept of MALL appears to positively influence SLA through further motivation and time on task (Mellow, 2005). To some extent my technologies push information and knowledge to me for language learning. This is particularly evident in DuoLingo where there is no choice of what to learn, just to complete the lessons to reach the next. However, Quizlet fosters the pull concept to an extent as there is a dearth of information and knowledge and it’s up to the user to choose which will benefit them the most. Perhaps the biggest reason I enjoy MALL is that the learning is catered for me to be used anywhere, anytime (Ally, 2007; Traxler, 2009). Although this may partly contradict what I mentioned above about DuoLingo, it was still my choice to select DuoLingo and I did so as it caters for my specific learning styles. Pedagogically, MALL has been demonstrated to positively influence learning through personalised, situated, authentic, spontaneous, context aware and informal practices (Kukulsha-Hulme, 2009). In the context of my technologies I don’t believe they support situated learning as I am developing my French language for further use than just navigating devices and communicating online. Similarly, the learning is only authentic for online use; however I believe this translates to real-world knowledge and skills, as mentioned in previous blog posts. Although I rarely undertake such practices, my iPad has the potential to capitalise on context aware practices to promote further learning experiences. However, contingent learning is evident through the combination of all my technologies and I often further investigate vocabulary in different contexts after learning on Quizlet and/or DuoLingo. The future of MALL in education is looking very excited as technologies are ever progressing with ever increasing implications in schools (Godwin-Jones, 2011; Watson & Plymale, 2011). I am interested to see how this will affect the teaching and learning of my future students either as a non-specialised primary teacher or a French teacher.

As next week is my final week, I wrote my second and final 200 word short essay on the topic of ‘travel’. I considered the feedback that was given to me after my first attempt as well as new vocabulary and improved sentence structures while writing. This was a great activity that made me feel very confident about my learning journey so far. I was able to incorporate new words that I’ve learned from all of my technologies and create a far more engaging and high quality essay. However, I won’t truly know how much I’ve improved until I receive the feedback from my NS sister. Next week I will discuss the feedback and similarities/differences to my self-evaluation to identify where I have improved and future implications for learning.

Now to focus on this week’s experiences using my technologies.

First I will quickly evaluate the appropriateness of my technologies used in my challenge through the six conditions of CALL (Levy, 2015a):
1. Language learning potential – The potential of language learning through the combination of these technologies is infinite. However, in the context of my challenge, development of vocabulary and grammar are the only possibilities. This is due to focussing on these language competencies and silencing the rest. However, the amount learned each week greatly depends on the engagement of activities and the range of new vocabulary and grammar available through the many learning experiences.

2. Learner fit – As previously mentioned in this blog, these technologies have been strategically selected as their combination caters for my multimodal style of learning. Additionally, my analytical and authority-orientated styles of language learning are catered for. Furthermore, the learning experiences encountered through using this technologies are specific to my language level. This is achieved through selecting intermediate level appropriate study sets on Quizlet, taking a placement test on DuoLingo, and challenging myself through French immersion in Facebook and my iPad.
3. Meaning focus – While using these technologies, especially my iPad and Facebook, I have the potential to focus my learning away from the meaning of the experience. This has been an issue so far with the previously mentioned technologies as I am not suing them solely for language learning. Instead, they are used for contextualisation and incidental learning. In doing so, it is easy to disregard the new French vocabulary and grammar, ultimately losing meaning from the technologies. However, when I stumble upon something new I quickly engage in the learning and focus on the meaning of the experience.
4. Authenticity – By incorporating my iPad and Facebook into this learning challenge I am increasing the authenticity of the learning. This is achieved as the technologies are not created specifically for language learning use, meaning I am engaging with ‘real-world’ authentic texts to enhance my learning experiences.
5. Positive impact – While these technologies sadly don’t assist in the learning of culture, they are positively impacting on my development of vocabulary and grammar, as well as my metacognitive strategies especially when used with this blog. This challenge as a whole is positively impacting on my skills and knowledge of learning languages successfully, for myself and future students.

6. Practicality – I have designed this challenge and implemented these technologies in order to maximise practicality. This means I can engage with the technologies anytime, anywhere. The biggest benefit of this is being able to focus on language learning during transit to work and university, when I would usually just be playing games.

This week in DuoLingo I have progressed where I anticipated and have only 2 skills left to learn to reach the next checkpoint and my major goal! The skills I learned this week included Prepositions 2 and Places. The Places skill in particular was motivating and engaging as it is generally an area of vocabulary that is a weakness of mine, while also being a practical area of any language. In class this week Melanie and I finally worked out how to add each other using my iPad. So now there are 3 people on my leader board to give me extra motivation. Use the QR Code below to see where I sit this week! Next week will be very interesting as I will be attempting to achieve all of my final goals. I am eager to see the final amount of learned vocabulary generated on the DuoLingo website. There will be lots of quantitative data useful in evaluating the effectiveness of this entire challenge. I will also be blogging about my experience of the Flirting skill. Currently I have 29 lingots and need 30 for this skill, so I am unable to do it this week.

 

This week’s study set on Quizlet was not as interesting as last week’s. Consequently, it took me longer to get under 15 seconds 3 times. I was also nowhere close to beating my personal best of 11.4 seconds. I did however complete it in 14.4, 14 and 13.4 seconds. Now that I have completed the 4^th and final unit in French Intermediate 1, I will select an interesting yet challenging study for next week.

This week on Facebook there was again a lot of incidental learning of grammar and vocabulary from routine activities. A survey suggestion popped up from Facebook asking me to answer some questions to improve my news feed. I am very glad I did this as I was quite unfamiliar with some of the vocabulary in the survey. For the first 2 questions I thought it was asking if I would like to see these sorts of pictures/posts in my news feed. I then quickly realised that it was asking if they looked like ads! From there on I was able to rate each picture/post appropriately. It had some suggestions from French restaurants and shops, giving me some authentic text to read in French in a push style, as mentioned above. This was a great learning experience filled with new vocabulary and a range of sentence structures, both assisting in achieving my goals.

Using my iPad has been so comfortable that I decided to change some settings. I was getting a little irritated at the amount of notifications I was getting, especially from Blackboard! So I found the section in the setting to change this and turned off many apps’ notifications as well as only displaying notifications on the Blackboard app’s picture rather than having them pop-up and/or stay in my notifications bar. On top of this great authentic learning experience, I set a couple more reminders (Rappels), this time with ease.

And so the pattern continues, the technologies have not been using similar vocabulary and grammar this week, unlike last (but like the one before, but not like the one before that!). I believe this is again due to the change in Quizlet study set and progression in DuoLingo. Next week, by this time selecting my own Quizlet study set, I will hopefully see this pattern continue and finish on a positive note where all technologies are using similar vocabulary, allowing for repetition. As demonstrated by Levy (2015b), repetition and opportunities for retrieval are important factors in incidental vocabulary learning. I believe the combination of my iPad and Facebook allow for both repetition and retrieval of incidentally learned vocabulary, maximising the incidental learning potential. The combination of these technologies has continued to prove to be effective in catering for my multimodal style of learning which is keeping me motivated and sufficiently challenged. Furthermore, the nature of the activities has also continued to cater for my analytical and authority-orientated language learning styles.

References

Ally, M. (2007). Guest Editorial-Mobile Learning. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 8(2).

Godwin-Jones, R. (2011). Emerging technologies: Mobile apps for language learning. Language Learning and Technology, 15(2), 2-11.

Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2009). Will mobile learning change language learning? ReCALL, 21(2), 157-165.

Levy, M. (2015a). Week 4: Evaluation of LL technologies [Powerpoint slides]. Unpublished manuscript, SLAT2002, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia

Levy, M. (2015b). Week 9: Mobile language learning [Powerpoint slides]. Unpublished manuscript, SLAT2002, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia.

Mellow, P. (2005, December). The media generation: Maximise learning by getting mobile. In Ascilite (pp. 470-476).

Traxler, J. (2009) Learning in a Mobile Age. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1): 1–12.

Waring, R., & Nation, I. S. P. (2004). Second language reading and incidental vocabulary learning. Angles on the English speaking world, 4, 97-110.

Watson, C.E., & Plymale, W.O. (2011). The pedagogy of things: Ubiquitous learning, student culture, and constructivist pedagogical practice. In T. Kidd & I. Chen (Eds.), Ubiquitous learning: A survey of applications, research, and trends. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.