Although receptive (aural) and productive (oral) fluencies are precursors to reading and writing fluency, it is not uncommon for them to be marginalized in EFL classrooms. This disparity exists for various reasons, one being learners’ lack of access to the English language. However, this inequality should be rapidly disappearing as interactive technologies give learners and educators greater access to English. If learners and educators advance alongside 21st-century technologies, the aural-oral disparity in EFL learning may become a 20th-century plague.

Watch this Mobile in Review video to catch a glimpse of how mobile took over the world in 2011. Mobile learning, known as mlearning, refers to learning that is available anytime, anywhere through hand-held devices. Mlearning is undergoing rapid evolution. The pervasive use of interactive wireless mobile devices by learners has positioned them to lead rather than follow. The relationship between technology and teaching is synergistic in that the more interactive the technology, the more diverse and multifaceted its use as a learning tool (Quinn, 2012). Mtools fulfill a new learner dependency on easy, rapid, and interactive access to data, which, in turn, drive up demand for mobile devices and resources. Rapid development of new interactive apps continues to drive consumers toward the latest and greatest in such a quick succession that most shudder at the thought of staying on top―but therein lies the crux of mtools: mtools are learner-centric not learner-centered, thus creating a paradigm shift in learning pedagogies as the i-generation comes of age in the 21st century.

SHATTERING THE SILENCE

An implicit barrier in virtual learning is building a sense of community due to the lack of face-to-face (f2f) contact, which deemphasizes experience and overemphasizes description (Bonk, 2011). Choreographed courses are being swiftly overrun by the rapid explosion of interactive mtools, which, if used alongside experiential, social constructionist pedagogy, may very well explicitly shatter the psychological barrier between f2f and virtual learning by increasing rather than decreasing interaction and community building. Twentieth-century education has relied on institutional or instructor control over course design and delivery, whether f2f or virtual. Constructivist pedagogy, which is learner-centered, supports the co-construction of learning to more closely align education with the learner (Horton, 2012); however, mlearning tools are learner-centric, shifting learning from controlled ingestion to uncontrolled creation. The 21st century is set to make the learner the creator. Industry leaders in interactive mtools are app creators and smart mobile device companies. Soon to be loaded with quad core processors, such as the Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, their incredible performance capabilities will run on cloud platforms to further increase interactive capabilities by allowing users to sync and manage their content and interactions. Mdevices, equipped with megapixel resolution cameras, which can be used alongside free interactive photo-voice apps such as Yodio and commercial ones like VoiceThread, give learners an opportunity to comment, discuss, and collaborate on videos and images, using webcams, voice, text, and freehand drawings. Their uses are as endless as your imagination; combine this with new dual-interaction apps like Apple’s FaceTime that allow users to video chat and host a meeting simultaneously and voilà, you have a speaking class in the cloud! Online tech-gurus rumor that very soon, maybe as early as this year, mcreate apps will be released. As an ESL educator, primarily immersed in secondary school speaking classes, I find that teaching speaking is getting really exciting!

GOING SONIC

The world is facing a huge increase in the number of students as the world population moves from six billion to the United Nations-predicted nine billion by 2050 (Bonk, 2011). This shift in demographics means that learning opportunities must become available on a much grander scale and platform. To meet these growing demands, education must shift rapidly from a passive knowledge-transfer epistemology to an adaptive interactive one whereby learning is no longer learner-centered but rather learner-centric. Mlearning is well positioned to develop the first global learner-centric platform.

LISTENING TO SPEAK: SPEAKING TO LISTEN

Mlearning tools are rapidly paving the way for interactive listening and speaking. Interactive scripts are already available on TEDtalks, which allow listeners to access spoken and written discourse with simultaneous translations between L1 and L2. EReaders already highlight text and allow readers to adjust the reading speed of natural voice speech-to-text (STT). It is just a matter of time before translation devices such as the ImTranslator are fundamental mtools―speak, listen, translate at your own speed anywhere, anytime! Such fluidity gives learners opportunities to create individualized learning that best represents their learning needs, building on autodidactic learner-centric pedagogy―a grave necessity to educate the upcoming population.

Android tablets and iPads are set to rapidly leverage mlearning as most learning management systems (LMSs) already have smart mobile capabilities. According to tech analysts, LMSs are swiftly changing to support learner interface control, input, and plugin apps for external media, including the incorporation of seamless social media integration and creation apps. Moodle, an open-source LMS, already offers plugins for most of these features in their 2.0 or 2.1 versions, and because the systems are open source, institutions can have code written that aligns directly with their needs. Therefore, total integration of socially mediated learner-negotiated material design is well set to explode. MediaWiki powers open-source wikis, such as Wikipedia, but a good example of an institution co-constructing learning using MediaWiki is the UBC wiki. And now you can embed commercial tools such as Cisco’s WebEx or Panopto and take synchronous and asynchronous interaction, listening, and speaking to a whole new level. (Skype offers an affordable option but does not, at this time, have mvideo integration for group interactions.) Embedding web f2f interaction tools in LMSs allows interaction between learners and educators to be more private. Thus, in this framework, the question is not where listening and speaking are situated in the 21st century, but where are they not situated. The fact that this digital generation has no perception of life without technology may be amazing to digital immigrants. Here are a couple of unadulterated excerpts from young digital age EFL adolescents, taken from a January 2012 writing examination:

Technology takes many advantages for us, so we can not live without technology. When you go out, there are many people have a smart phone, compairs with past. It is a huge change, smart phone has a lot of functions, it can replace many things which is important for us in past. In the past, we can surf internet at home only, but now if you have a smart phone, you can surf internet everywhere, you can take photo, video, go to YOUtube, find information, send SMS with your smart phone. Sometimes, I even think that smart phone look like Hong Kong people’s girl friend. ―Chow Hui Tak

Hong Kong people can not lose technology or smart phone because technology or phone is our lives. One day if technology or phone lose in this place, I think we will die because technology is our life, our life is technology. Many people have smart phone now. Like I-phone, HTC, and Galaxy. All smart phone can download apps. Some apps are game. Technology and games are very popular in Hong Kong because there have our childhood and we cannot lose them. ―Leung Ho Yi

The oral and aural narrating traditions that evolved to retain collective knowledge and experience have cultivated language learning. Therefore, moving toward haptic integration for a total language-learning experience is not a radical new idea but one as well immersed in our antediluvian past as it is in the present. Therefore, it is not surprising that haptics are increasingly drawn onto the interactive stage. It will be interesting to see if Samsung’s haptic transparent smart window is a precursor to flexible smart-haptic 3D mobile screens. If so, how will moving into a 3D mtool environment change speaking and listening interactions in the near future, or how will intentional coding, being spear-headed by Dr. Charles Simonyi of Stanford University, change cross-lingual communication. Silicon m-educators may seem like science fiction to carbon educators, but it won’t be the first time science fiction has defined a new reality. Compound this with the discovery and manipulation of the language of life (genetic engineering) and who knows how this will shape interactive communication. But what is obvious is that teaching speaking and listening with mtools is rapidly becoming authentic, dynamic, and learner-centric.

REFERENCES

Bonk, C. (2011). The world is open. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Horton, W. (2012). E-learning by design (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

Quinn, C. (2012). The mobile academy: mlearning for higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Ruth M. Smith has taught English for 25 years and has been working in an EFL context for the past 2 years. She is currently an instructor at the Man Kwan Educational Organisation: The Jockey Club Edu Young College in Tin Shui Wai and will be completing her master’s in TESOL in April 2012.