55

Let the Students Lead the Way: an Exploratory Study of Mobile Language Learning in a Classroom Sobah Abbas Petersen

Dept. of Computer & Information Sciences

Norwegian University of Science & Technology

Trondheim, Norway sap@idi.ntnu.no +47 73551336

Roslyn Sell Trondheim International

School Festningsgate 2

Trondheim, Norway roslyn@this.no +47 73 51 48 00

Josie Watts Trondheim International

School Festningsgate 2

Trondheim, Norway josie@this.no

+47 73 51 48 00

ABSTRACT This paper describes an exploratory study that was conducted at an international school using a mobile application designed to support situated mobile language learning. The mobile application, called Cloudbank, supports a repository for words and expressions that can be shared by several users. The study was started where the application was used for a limited activity within the classroom, which is using figures of speech in English. The students were given the freedom to explore the functionalities of the application, the affordances of the mobile device as well as to use it for other activities. The teachers initially believed that the application will be beneficial for learning figures of speech in English. The study revealed that Cloudbank is beneficial for supporting learning in several areas, collaboration among students and ownership of the knowledge leading to retention of the knowledge. It also highlighted how the technology stimulated discussions about the cultural aspects of languages. This paper presents an overview of the exploratory study and the observations.

Author Keywords Mobile Language Learning, Collaboration, Figures of Speech, Language and Culture, student-centered.

INTRODUCTION This paper describes an exploratory study that was conducted at an international school using a mobile application designed to support situated mobile language learning. The mobile application, called Cloudbank, supports a repository for words and expressions that can be shared by several learners.

The popularity of mobile technologies such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and portable media players in education have been documented by several researchers (Roschelle, Sharples & Chan, 2005; Naismith et al., 2005). Language learning has been an area where technology, in particular mobile technology in recent times, has been popular. Initially, mobile-based language learning services focused on providing instant help in either obtaining the meaning of a word (Morita, 2003) or help in pronouncing a word. Later, improved support was provided by partial personalised learning such as supporting pronunciation of specific sounds for specific user groups, e.g. (Uther, Zipitria, Uther, & Singh, 2005) and (Ogata, H., L. H. Gan, et al., 2008). Mobile learning denotes learning that is conducted while the learner is on the go or when the learner is mobile (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2005). This involves providing easy access to appropriate learning resources. Thus, there has been considerable focus on personalisation and contextualisation of learning resources accessible via mobile devices. For example, the location and a users preference of learning resources are defined using a user profile in (C.-M. Chen, Li, & Chen, 2007); additional parameters such as the users behaviour, the device and the environment are considered in (Paredes, Ogata, Yano, & Martin, 2005) and the users learning interests and user groups are considered in (Petersen, Markiewicz & Bjrnebekk, 2009).

Mobile learning emphasizes the active involvement of the learner where formal learning is complemented by informal learning. This is well in line with the constructivist thinking where the learner needs to experience and apply concepts and relate them to their existing body of knowledge. In particular, social constructivism (Vygotsy, 1978), which focuses on the social context that shapes the construction of knowledge, is important in language learning. While there is support for personalised language learning, there are very few applications that focus on the collaborative aspect of language learning. The Cloudbank application used in this study is

56

designed to support the sharing of content among language learners. The aim of the system was to develop a mobile (Android) app that would enable advanced language learners to collect and describe multimedia language and culture-related content they came across in everyday life within their target language culture. The content is then uploaded to a repository that is accessible by other Cloudbank users, thus enabling sharing of learning content among several language learners (Pemberton, Winter & Fallahkhair, 2009). Cloudbank provides a medium for learners to create their own wordlists, which contains words and expressions with the learners descriptions of them in specific contexts. Thus, the learner is able to share their understanding of a word or an expression through their experiences with peer learners.

The aim of this paper is to describe an exploratory study that was conducted at an international school, in the classroom, using the Cloudbank application. The main objective of the study was to evaluate if the Cloudbank application is beneficial to the learning of the students and to explore how such mobile applications can support the learning and the pedagogical approach. The study was started where the application was used for a limited activity within the classroom, which is using figures of speech in English. The students were given the freedom to explore the functionalities of the application, the affordances of the mobile device as well as to use it for other activities. The teachers initially believed that the application will be beneficial for learning figures of speech in English. In this study, the teachers took a back seat approach and let the students lead the way. The study revealed that Cloudbank is beneficial for supporting learning in areas other than what was initially anticipated.

The use of the Cloudbank application proved a success in the classroom and it revealed a number of interesting issues about using ICT and mobile technologies in the classroom, which are both social and pedagogical in nature. Some of these address collaboration among students and peer support among the students, ownership of the knowledge leading to retention of the knowledge as well as how the students appropriated the technology into the different learning activities in the classroom. It also highlighted how the technology stimulated discussions about the cultural aspects of languages. This paper presents an overview of the exploratory study and the observations. We are currently conducting a qualitative evaluation of the study.

The rest of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the case, Section 3 describes the design of the study, Section 4 discusses the observations during the study, Section 5 presents an overview of the design of the evaluation process and Section 6 summarises the paper.

CASE DESCRIPTION The study described in this paper has been conducted at the Trondheim International School (THIS), who provides an international education in English, based on the International Baccalaureate (IBO) program. The study was conducted with the students in Year 4. There were 28 students who are 9 or 10 years old. The students represented a diversity of cultural backgrounds; there were students from 12 different countries and as many as 10 different languages are spoken by the children. Apart from 2 students, English is either their second or third language. Several of the students have parents from different backgrounds; thus they are used to a multi-lingual home and school community. The class teachers are native English speakers from Australia.

The IB pedagogical approach uses an enquiry based mode of teaching and learning where the students learn by enquiring into a topic or a theme, called a Unit of Inquiry. The main subjects in the curriculum are Literacy, Mathematics, Norwegian (as a second language), and the Unit of Inquiry. Other traditional subjects such as Geography, History and Science are studied through the Unit of Inquiry, which helps to focus the learning efforts in Literacy, Mathematics and Norwegian around a specific topic. The classroom is arranged in such a way that students can gather around and work in small groups. Several learning aids such as the PC, reference books and other material are made available for everyone and students are encouraged to move around the classroom to obtain what they need for their work.

In the classroom, the students have access to a PC with internet access and a Smartboard. Cloudbank was made available to them on 5 HTC Desire HD mobile phones. The study took place from the first week of March until the second week of June, 2011. The students were introduced to Cloudbank using the repository of words that were available at the beginning of the study. This included some Figures of speech and a few words with pictures to describe them.

This was the first time the students had access to mobile phones in their classroom as a part of their studies. Some of the students owned mobile phones; however they had not used it for anything related to their studies.

STUDY DESIGN The study was an exploratory one. When the study was started, the class was working on figures of speech for literacy. Since the Cloudbank repository contained some figures of speech, it was decided that it was natural to start using it to support the students to learn figures of speech. To start with, the students were allowed to use it for learning figures of speech and new words for an hour everyday. To ensure that all the students had an equal chance of using the system, the students were divided into 5 groups (only 5 devices were available) and the student took

57

turns in using the phones. The class kept a log of who was using the system to ensure that there was equity of usage. Another reason for restricting the use of the devices for a specific activity at a specified time was also to ensure that the students used the devices for Cloudbank and to maintain focus on the application rather than the gadget and all the other affordances of the mobile phone.

As the students got more comfortable using the system, they were allowed to use it more freely at any time during the class. At this point, the teachers decided to let the students take more control of their use of the system and be open to see what other parts of the curriculum could also be supported by the use of Cloudbank. The students were also allowed to use the mobile phones for other activities such as taking photographs.

The Cloudbank technology was demonstrated to the class by one of the students who had been exposed to the system earlier. It was demonstrated using the web-based widget, using the Smartboard. The basic functionalities of the system, which are adding new content to the repository and browsing through the content, were shown. Once the students started using the mobile phones and became confident using the system, they helped each another. The teachers took a back seat and let the students have control of the situation.

OBSERVATIONS As mentioned earlier, this study was an exploratory study to observe how a mobile application may benefit the students and support their learning process. A summary of the main points that were observed during the study are as follows:

x Mobility and accessibility x Appropriation of the technology x Collaboration among students x Additional source of reference x Ownership

The following sub-sections provide a brief discussion on the above four points.

Mobility and Accessibility Mobility has often been described in terms of physical space or location and time (Cooper 2001). More recently, Sharples et al. have elaborated on the mobility that we are concerned with in Mobile Learning as mobility in physical space, conceptual space, social space and of technology (Sharples, Arnedillo Snchez et al. 2007). Kristoffersen and Ljungberg have illustrated mobility in the physical space further by introducing the notion of modality of mobility as the fundamental pattern of motion (Kristoffersen and Ljungberg 1998). They propose wandering, travelling and visiting as the main patterns of mobility. Another aspect of mobility among learners come from the fact that learning is facilitated by communities and that learners move between communities (Petersen and Divitini 2005).

In our study, since the learning arena that we have been interested in is confined to the classroom and the devices remained in the classroom, the physical mobility of the learners was restricted to the classroom. Initially, since the students were allowed to use the mobile phones in a dedicated area of the classroom, the students moved to the place where the mobile phones were located to use the system. Once, the students got more used to the system, the students continued moving to the mobile phones and bringing them to the place in the classroom where they were working. The students did this whenever they came across something they could add to the Cloudbank repository. Similarly, if they were looking for a word or a phrase, they began to check if they could find that in the Cloudbanks repository before they checked other sources. This behaviour connects the ease of access or the accessibility of the learning material to mobility. The students found it easier to access the Cloudbank repository rather than other sources such as dictionaries, reference books or the Internet, which were also available in the classroom. The ease with which they could move the source, which in this case was available on the mobile phone, made that the first choice for the students.

In addition, the easy access to learning material via the Cloudbank application made it easier for the students to browse and search for learning material as well as add content. In particular, for students who were a bit shy to ask someone, the Cloudbank application encouraged them to use it for browsing content as well as to contribute content.

Appropriation of the Technology The notion of appropriation is often used in socio-cultural learning theory. A good overview of technology appropriation in collaborative learning is provided in (Overdijk and van Diggel 2006). The authors quote several definitions of appropriation, highlighting the different aspects of it such as adapting something to ones own use

58

and the way technologies and their uses are shaped through the users interaction with the technology as well as the social interactions.

In our study, Cloudbank was introduced to the students for a specific task. However, they were given the freedom to explore the functionalities of the application as well as the device. The students had been active in doing this and thus had appropriated the technology for use in other learning activities. The students started using Cloudbank for explaining figures of speech, using textual descriptions. An example of an entry contributed by one of the students is shown in Figure 1, a. After a few weeks of using Cloudbank, the students started exploring additional capabilities in the application. They discovered that it was possible to add pictures in addition to the text to describe a phrase; an example of such an entry in Cloudbank can be seen in Figure 1, b.

Figure 1: Example of Figures of Speech in Cloudbank Figure 2. Examples of Maths terminology in Cloudbank

While using Cloudbank for figures of speech and new words and phrases in English, the students realised that they could also use it for their Maths. When they came across a new maths term, the students started using Cloudbank to collect and share their maths terminology, see Figure 2 Figure . Unlike some words and expressions, maths terms often have precise meanings, which can be illustrated through a diagram. The students discovered that they could use the camera on the mobile phone to capture a drawing to illustrate the meaning of the term and upload it to the Cloudbank repository, see Figure 2, b. Note that the students have also started using the functionality tags to distinguish the category of the content; e.g. figures of speech or idiom and Maths.

In addition to using Cloudbank for the different types of words, it spurred discussions around the figures of speech, stimulating the students to compare them to similar ones or what a similar expression may mean in the other languages that they spoke. Students with a second language quickly found that cloudbank could support other languages too and it was very motivating and rewarding for them to have their own language recognized. This created a bridge between home languages and classroom learning. This also brought in the dimension of language and culture, enhancing the cultural awareness among the students as well as contributing to their knowledge of other countries and their cultures.

Collaboration among students The students discovered that they could edit the content in the Cloudbank repository and started editing each others work. They took pride in telling the original contributor of a word or a figure of speech that they had added to the original description in the Cloudbank repository. Collaboration also included extensions of each others entries, discussion and debate regarding definitions of figures of speech resulting in clearer understanding and an acknowledgment of anothers perspective. Students had to defend their information in discussions with each other and together they often came to an agreement of the best definition.

The students were proud that they have helped someone else learn something from them. The shared repository supported in the Cloudbank application provided a means of collaboration through the shared content and collaborative contribution of editing of the content. The students also edited others contents while browsing by correcting the mistakes of others. This was indirectly evaluating the work of peers or learning from your peers.

The students explored the functions of Cloudbank in a guess and check manner with no fear of failure and they shared their mistakes and discoveries with each other. This is not found in a classroom using traditional reference material.

59

Additional Source of Reference Often students are reluctant to use a reference tool particularly a dictionary. However, using Cloudbank, this wasnt the case due possibly to two factors: (i) they were motivated to use the technology; (ii) they were not singled out as not knowing something because they could have been either adding to, or looking for information. The students realised that knowledge could be extended and refined unlike a dictionary or a set body of work. They were creating knowledge and not just gaining knowledge. This was a real life opportunity to enhance student awareness of how a google site needs to be checked for accuracy.

As the focus was adding to a body of knowledge with figures of speech, the students were hyperaware of figures of speech in their environment. They would come to school with figures of speech from movies, from books they were reading and from their parents language.

In general, the use of cloudbank encouraged the attitude that it was acceptable not to know something. Instead of ignoring a word or phrase you didnt know, it was possible to find out an answer, then add this to the class repository, whereby doing so would not only help yourself as a learner but possibly other class members as well.

Due to the low threshold of appropriation of technology, the teachers were able to incorporate a new reference material utilising traditional research skills. The technology had general high interest with everyday familiarity. Compared to the dictionaries, the students found it much easier to locate words in Cloudbank and to manipulate the mobile phone. The technology came in as an aid to an already existing program within the classroom. As the teachers observed the use, discussion and collaboration, the benefits of Cloudbank and its possible use as a learning tool, they incorporated it further into the class program.

Ownership The Cloudbank application was introduced to the class by one of the students. She demonstrated the basic capabilities to browse through the contents in the repository and to add content to the repository. At the beginning, the student who first introduced the application felt that she was the class Cloudbank champion. She felt a degree of ownership of the technology and that she was the most knowledgeable among the students in using the technology. However, after one or two weeks, the other students caught up with her and felt comfortable with the technology. The students felt that the Cloudbank was their own as they could add content and thus they felt ownership of the knowledge in the repository as the repository was created by them.

The students took responsibility for the resource. The teachers never had any problems returning, charging or with misuse of the technology. The technology became a respected part of the shared classroom.

EVALUATION An evaluation was conducted at the end of the study to capture the students impressions about Cloudbank and to understand how it may have contributed to their learning. The evaluation was conducted in three parts:

(i) A plenary discussion, led by one of the class teachers, where the students provided keywords on what they thought about Cloudbank. The aim of this was to get all the students focussed on the Cloudbank experiences and get them ready for the evaluation. This discussion was captured as a set of words and expressions on the whiteboard, as shown in Figure .

(ii) Group discussions, where the students were split into three groups, each one focusing on a different topic. The three topics were Collaboration, Function and usability and How did it help the teachers? Each group had a chance to contribute their ideas on each topic, for 15 minutes. Each group discussion was facilitated by a person that was not involved in the classroom teaching, i.e. two researchers from the university and one school teacher. This was to ensure that the students were not influenced by their class teachers. Here, the students were allowed to contribute their ideas and share their experiences with Cloudbank.

(iii) Individual questionnaires, where each student had to fill in an individual, semi-structured questionnaire. While the group discussions provided a lot of information, it was decided that the individual questionnaires would provide more qualitative and quantitative data as well as ensure that each individual student had the opportunity to contribute to the evaluation. While most of the questions had choices to cross off or smiley faces to indicate a scale, the students were also able to add comments for additional information. The questionnaire was designed to gather data on the attitudes, behaviour, the knowledge and skills and the impact of the Cloudbank application on the students learning.

60

Figure 3. Keywords describing the students' impressions of Cloudbank

We are currently analysing the data from the evaluation. Thus it is not possible to include any data in this paper. However, it can be concluded that the study was a positive experience for both the teachers and the students. As can be seen from Figure 3, the students had used it for a number of different activities some of which have been described in the previous sections

SUMMARY The exploratory study using the Cloudbank application in a classroom showed that the technology supported learning in areas other what was initially anticipated. Initially, the teachers let the students use it for one hour everyday, for learning Figures of speech and new words to improve their spelling and knowledge of the English language. However, over a very short time, the students had appropriated the technology to support them in their maths terminology, to learn and understand figures of speech in their own languages as well as Norwegian, which was the second language in the school. Through the figures of speech, it also stimulated discussions among the students on the cultural use of languages and the comparison of metaphors in the different languages.

The students collaborated in their work by supporting each other in using the Cloudbank application. More importantly, they collaborated through the technology by editing and extending each others work and by learning from each others contributions to the Cloudbank repository. Cloudbank quickly became an important source of reference in the classroom that the students felt proud of and responsible for.

The teachers believed that the Cloudbank application supported the learning process of the students in several ways. The fact that the students had to create the repository by adding the content, it helped the content become imprinted in their minds. Since the students created the repository, they felt ownership of the knowledge and this was reinforcing the knowledge and helped them retain what they had learned. It contributed a lot to the learning as they owned the knowledge, they understood it and they were motivated to reference it and improve it. The Cloudbank application helped increase their vocabulary and improve their spelling as well as increased their understanding of the math terminology.

During this study, one of the strengths of the Cloudbank application was seen as its simplicity and ease of use, making it extremely easily to adopt in the teaching practice in the class and it proved very easy to be integrated into the learning activities in the classroom. The teachers felt comfortable to adopt it in the classroom without a long trial period and the students had a very low threshold in starting to use it. From the teachers perspective, a routine activity of using Cloudbank became an engaging activity generating smiles and a positive class atmosphere.

This study also provided a positive impression of using mobile technologies and applications within a classroom. It highlighted a different aspect of mobility and accessibility and it showed the fine balance between the application and the technology or the gadget. There was a very clear purpose for which the students could see the value of Cloudbank; other students were using their work, so they could see the immediate purpose and the need for accuracy.

This paper presented a very brief overview of the observations made during an explorative study of using a mobile language learning application, Cloudbank, in a classroom. We are currently analysing the results from the

61

evaluation of the study conducted using questionnaires and focus groups with the students. Based on the positive experience from this study, we also plan to continue using the Cloudbank application in the school and to conduct a similar study with younger children.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been conducted within the European Union's Lifelong Learning Programme, Project number LLP 511776-LLP-1-2010-1-UK-KA3-KA3. In addition, the authors would like to thank the Interactive Technologies Research Group at the University of Brighton for letting us use the Cloudbank application, which was developed with support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), UK.

REFERENCES Chen, C.-M., Li, Y.-L., & Chen, M.-C. (2007). Personalised Context-Aware Ubiquitous Learning System for

Supporting Effective English Vocabulary Learning. Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2007), Niigata, Japan.

Cooper, G. (2001). The Mutable Mobile: Social Theory in the Wireless World. Wireless World, Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age. B. Brown, N. Green and R. Harper, Springer, London: 19-31.

IBO. "International Baccalaureate Organization." 2011, from http://www.ibo.org/.

Kristoffersen, S. and F. Ljungberg (1998). Representing Modalitites in Mobile Computing. Proceedings of Interactive Applications of Mobile Computing, (IMC'98), Rostock, Germany.

Morita, M. (2003). The Mobile-based Learning (MBL) in Japan. Paper presented at the First Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating Through Computing (C5'03).

Naismith, L., Lonsdale, P., Vavoula, G., & Sharples, M. (2005). Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning: NESTA Futurelab.

Ogata, H., L. H. Gan, et al. (2008). Supporting Task Assignments for Language Learning outside Classroom with Handhelds. 8th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies ICALT'08, Santander, Spain.

Overdijk, M. and W. van Diggel (2006). Technology Appropriation in Face-to-face Collaborative Learning. Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing, EC-TEL Workshop Proceedings. E. Tomadaki and P. Scott: 89-96.

Paredes, R. G., Ogata, H., Yano, Y. and Martin, G. A. S. (2005). A Multi-model Approach for Supporting the Personalisation of Ubiquitous Learning Applications. 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE 2005), Tokushima, Japan.

Pemberton, L., Winter, M. and Fallahkhair, S. (2009) A User Created Approach to Mobile Knowledge Sharing for Advanced Language Learners, Proceedings of mLearn, Orlando, Florida, pp. 184-187.

Petersen, S. A. and M. Divitini (2005). Language Learning: From Individual Learners to Communities. 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE 2005), Tokushima, Japan.

Petersen, S. A., J. K. Markiewicz and Bjrnebekk, S.S. (2009). Personalised and Contextualised Language Learning: Choose When, What and Where. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 4(1):33-60.

Roschelle, J., Sharples, M. and Chan, T. K. (2005) Introduction to the Special Issue on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, Guest Editorial. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 21: 159-161.

Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005, October 2005). Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning. Paper presented at the mLearn 2005, Cape Town, South Africa.

Sharples, M., I. Arnedillo Snchez, et al. (2007). Mobile Learning: Small devices, Big Issues. Technology Enhanced Learning: Principles and Products. N. Balacheff, S. Ludvigsen, T. de Jonget al. Heidelberg, Springer: 233-249.

Uther, M., Zipitria, I., Uther, J., & Singh, P. (2005). Mobile Adaptive Call (MOC): A Case-study in Developing a Mobile Learning Application for Speech/Audio Language Training. Paper presented at the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, Tokushima, Japan.

Vygotsy, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. The Development of Higher Psychological Processes: Harvard University Press.