More on mobile language learning from a Japanese perspective

Gunma JALT Summer Workshop
Kusatsu, Japan
20-21 August, 2015


Kusatsu Town Centre, Gunma, Japan. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2015. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

Following on directly from the JACET Summer Seminar, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Gunma JALT Summer Workshop, which likewise was held in Kusatsu, Japan, and which addressed the theme of Technological trends in education. I repeated my two presentations on Future mobile learning, given originally at the JACET Seminar.

In his presentation, From high-tech to low-tech environment: The challenge of introducing technology to ESL in the high school context, Stephen Howes presented an example of the technological context in a school in Australia as a comparison to those found in some Japanese schools. He showcased an Australian private high school environment with a one-to-one tablet programme where extensive use was made of cloud-based, schoolwide software platforms. Overall it was a blended learning context, but there was no obligation to use technology all the time, and teachers were encouraged to employ it when and where it was appropriate. Teachers, he suggested, need to be learners when it comes to new technologies and their implementation in education.

In his presentation, Handheld video games and English L2 learning, Ben Thanyawatpokin reported on a 2-month study of Japanese English major university students using video games to improve their English, where an experimental group of volunteers was compared with a control group who did not choose to play a video game in English. He found that the video graphics supported students’ text comprehension; that there was considerable incidental learning by students; that the daily conversational English in the game was perceived as useful by students; and that students’  initial motivation to learn English morphed into motivation to play the game. The experimental group also showed improvements on tests of reading speed and word recognition speed after the 2-month period.

In their presentation, The use of audio journals as an outside-of-classroom activity to foster L2 acquisition in college freshmen, Raymond Hoogenboom and Barry Keith spoke about their students’ submission of audio journals. After listening several times to a Voice of America news story of their choice, students record a 2-3 minute listening response journal (LRJ) entry in which they greet the listener, give the title and date of the news story, provide a short summary, give their opinions, and make a connection to their own lives. They are advised not to prepare a written text to read from, though notes are acceptable. The journals are submitted by email as MP3 or MP4 attachments, and the instructor drags them into the students’ iTunes playlists. Instructors can respond individually or collectively, although this is time-consuming. Through this process, the students are exposed to both meaning-focused input and meaning-focused output, and there can be a focus on form as well as fluency.

Overall, the Gunma JALT Workshop was a good opportunity to continue discussing mobile and other new technologies in language teaching with a different group of educators, and to hear their perspectives on the use of these tools in Japanese classrooms.

Leave a Reply


Skip to toolbar