The Advent of Apps

The prevalence of mobile devices and the vast amounts of content our students consume through them present a sea of change in language learning and pedagogy. It is now not only possible, but common for students to access multimedia content instantaneously, making Yeats’ axiom about education being the lighting of a fire and not the filling of a pail especially prudent. This unprecedented access to content has the potential to either bring classroom practice to new heights or to relegate teachers to being mere content curators. If we seek to reach students and provide meaningful learning experiences in this climate, the materials we develop must use mobile content to create opportunities for students to be autonomous learners. The opportunity presented to us is to harness mobile technology to shift our classrooms from “push” to “pull” environments.

Push vs Pull

The concept of educational environments focusing on either a push or pull approach has become a central focus following Stockwell’s and Levy’s (2012) plenary at KOTESOL; teachers must consider whether the traditional push model of giving out information and having students practice skills until they are mastered for use at a later date is truly an effective approach to language education. To practice a particular grammar or lexical item in the hopes that at some point in the future an appropriate context for that item arises and students will address the situation correctly feels very much like the banking model of education, which Paulo Freire went to great lengths to dismantle back in his 1970 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The concept that students should essentially passively receive information has been shown to be ineffective at best and downright stunting of true inquiry and education at its worst (Freire, 1970). Today, even when skills are the focus, practicing with content that will be useful in later situations remains an exercise in pushing content onto students.

The idea of pull asks the question “what if students could access the lexical items or grammar features necessary to successfully communicate in any given moment?” Mobile devices allow this access to immediately useful language skills practice. What does this use of devices look like? Rather than simply supporting the old banking model by using mobile devices to show videos related to a topic already studied, teachers can make the students’ first exposure to the desired language content “pullable” by creating the situation in which it is needed and then directing students to tools that allow them to engage with what they need in that moment. This represents a shift away from preteaching with students performing when prompted.

The focus in that traditional pedagogical set-up is on what the teacher wishes to see the student do. By shifting the focus to what students want to say and do in a situation, we allow for more autonomy and increased student motivation to actually internalize the content. This shift can be described as a move from “prompt” to “project.”

Prompt vs Project

Developing contexts in which specific language features are required in order to communicate is inherently more motivating than asking a student to remember today’s lesson for the future. Compare the first prompt, below, designed to measure students’ prelearning of comparative and superlative forms, to the second task, an introduction to a context in which students will need to be able to compare and contrast:

1. Write about the differences between your hometown and this city. Describe the differences with details and examples.

2. A friend is visiting. You will go out to eat dinner tomorrow night. Choose between three different restaurants by explaining the food at each place.

A chief difference between the first prompt and the second more project-like task is the orientation of the tasks. The prompt is solely focused on forms. Students will understand that they need to use adjectives with “-er than” or “more than” to complete this task. While this ensures clear expectations for the student, it does not encourage the level of personalization and nuance that the second task does. The need to truly make a decision about the best restaurant has the ability to draw out varied forms and even types of comparison. The content students would access to complete this task would not be sufficient were it to only teach the most common types of comparison done with adjectives and “-er than” or “less than.” Students would be motivated to ask questions of degree, such as “What if I want to say this restaurant is really, really, REALLY good?” or “How can I say that this restaurant and another one are the same?” These types of questions are far more likely to arise when students are figuring out how they can solve a problem up front, thus guiding their learning toward more complete language use.

Teachers also enjoy more freedom in teaching what forms will be used to do comparison. Mobile devices then become tools that allow students who already want to know how to use specific language skills to access those skills themselves; this stands in contrast to the temptation to use mobile devices as mere supplements to traditional classroom instruction.

Suggested Apps

The previously described context/project approach is the perfect situation in which to use the growing field of “augmented reality” apps. These apps allow physical objects, like a class handout, picture in a textbook, or even the space within a room to act as triggers, allowing access to multimedia content on any mobile device. Students need only point their device at a given object and video, audio, or even old fashioned grammar tables will appear on their screen.

Two augmented reality apps that are especially teacher friendly are Layar and Aurasma. With both of these web-based apps, teachers add lesson materials to a website. They then set a relevant image as a trigger that students will use to find needed content. For our restaurant project, this could mean using a picture of an actual menu from a restaurant as a trigger; teachers can allow students to read actual dishes on the menu and, when ready, pull the language skills needed to answer the question of which restaurant they would enjoy. The entire grammar lesson is accessed simply by looking at the menu through the lens of a smartphone.

Reference

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Stockwell, G., & Levy, M. (2012) Oct. 21. Mobile language learning: Turning challenges into opportunities. Plenary presented at the KOTESOL International Conference, Seoul, South Korea. KOTESOL Proceedings: https://koreatesol.org/sites/default/files/pdf_publications
/KOTESOL-Proceeds2012web.pdf

Kurtis Foster is an international educator at Missouri State University in partnership with the Sister Cities Association, Isesaki, Japan, and has previously taught at Kyungnam University, Republic of Korea. He enjoys seeking out the intersections of student experience, where the community meets the classroom and interest becomes engagement.