Mobile-assisted language learning [Revised and updated version]

Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) is the use of smartphones and other mobile technologies in language learning, especially in situations where portability and situated learning offer specific advantages. A key attraction of mobile learning is the ubiquity of mobile phones. Typical applications can support learners in reading, listening, speaking and writing in the target language, either individually or in collaboration with one another. Increasingly, MALL applications relate language learning to a person’s physical context when mobile, primarily to provide access to location-specific language material or to enable learners to capture aspects of language use in situ and share it with others. Mobile learning can be formal or informal, and mobile devices may form a bridge connecting in-class and out-of-class learning. When learning takes place outside the classroom, it is often beyond the reach and control of the teacher. This can be perceived as a threat, but it is also an opportunity to revitalize and rethink current approaches to teaching and learning. Mobile learning appeals to a wide range of people for a variety of reasons. It may exclude some learners but it is often a mechanism for inclusion. It is likely that the next generation of mobile learning will be more ubiquitous, which means that there will be smart systems everywhere for digital learning. Mobile learning is proving its potential to address authentic learner needs at the point at which they arise, and to deliver more flexible models of language learning

Theoretical perspectives on mobile language learning diaries and noticing for learners,teachers and researchers

This paper considers the issue of 'noticing' in second language acquisition, and argues for the potential of handheld devices to: (i) support language learners in noticing and recording noticed features 'on the spot', to help them develop their second language system; (ii) help language teachers better understand the specific difficulties of individuals or those from a particular language background; and (iii) facilitate data collection by applied linguistics researchers, which can be fed back into educational applications for language learning. We consider: theoretical perspectives drawn from the second language acquisition literature, relating these to the practice of writing language learning diaries; and the potential for learner modelling to facilitate recording and prompting noticing in mobile assisted language learning contexts. We then offer guidelines for developers of mobile language learning solutions to support the development of language awareness in learners

Interactional expectations and linguistic knowledge in academic expert discourse (Japanese/German)

Zugl. erschienen in Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit Folge B / Working Papers in Multilingualism Series B, 59/2005Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch

Looking into the definition and characteristics of u-learning

This paper describes a new learning paradigm,known as ubiquitous learning or u-learning, which is supported by the ubiquitous computing technologies.In addition, the paper also aims at providing specific information related to u-learning for researchers who are interested in venturing the new area of ubiquitous computing.The u-learning definition and characteristics are also compared and discussed. As a result, a conclusive definition of u-learning together with its characterization is proposed. Finally, some of the u-learning applications are explained to further enhance the understanding of u-learning concept

Believing is seeing : awareness and alignment in the acquisition and communication of social meaning

When speakers engage in the complex phenomenon of speech, they use language to convey and understand social information about identities, stances, moods and goals through the use of linguistic forms. While it is true that social evaluation studies have demonstrated that individuals show awareness of the socially-indexed meaning of linguistic forms, many expected associations are not always, if at all, identifiable by listeners. Such asymmetry raises a significant question in sociolinguistic research: if individuals cannot reliably show an awareness of social meaning, how can it be used as a resource to construct identities, stances and personas? Building on the growing body of work which examines individuals’ agency and awareness of socially-indexed meaning, this study’s objective was to investigate the role of individuals’ beliefs and their alignment to linguistic forms in the awareness of socially-indexed meaning. The specific aim of the current study was to examine the apparent mismatches between expected socially-indexed meanings born of linguistic variables which are socially stratified and individuals’ actual sociolinguistic awareness. An experimental series was designed which employed social evaluation judgements combined with corpus analyses and self-report tasks to investigate the role of the individual in the acquisition and communication of social meaning. The research questions targeted the situational context (no-context vs a workplace), the variant’s social salience (stereotypes, markers and indicators), the alignment of the individual to a linguistic form (a user of the form vs a non-user), and the method by which the association between the form and social category were acquired (implicitly vs explicitly). Two languages were chosen for their suitability and validity towards the current project’s research questions and aims; namely, Japanese and Australian English. Within the languages, sociolinguistically relevant variables and categories were chosen to provide a rigorous examination of individuals’ perceptual awareness of socially-indexed meaning, investigate how associations are learned by individuals, and examine the role of individual alignment to a linguistic variable and its expected social meaning. Overall, the results of the experimental series suggested that the explicit beliefs and the alignment of the individual to a linguistic form mediates their linguistic experience and thus shapes their awareness of the form’s socially indexed meaning. While the situational context of the linguistic form did not impact individuals’ judgements considerably in the current study, the social salience of the form was shown to play a role as a factor which mediates individuals’ awareness of the form’s socially-indexed meaning. In the case of individual alignment, speakers who do not identify as users of a particular variant appear to be more sensitive to the social meaning of the variant than those who identify as users. Finally, on the notion of acquisition, individuals showed awareness of indexical associations that did not reflect the distribution of the variant in the speech community, suggesting that a mechanism may exist by which individuals override their linguistic experience to reflect socially constructed beliefs about the distribution of forms

Cognitive Mechanisms of Communicative Behaviour of Representatives of Various Linguistic Cultures of the East

Communicative behaviour is primarily based on the understanding of the ways a person interacts with other members of society and how much this reflects the cultural component of the communication process. This also includes the structure of discourse, which affects the communicative content of communication. The relevance of studying the specifics of organising discourse by representatives of oriental linguistic cultures is conditioned by the need to understand the deep cognitive mechanisms of their communicative behaviour in the context of the ever-increasing globalisation of the modern world. The novelty of the study is that it analyses some key factors that have a direct impact on the formation of communicative behaviour of carriers of the eastern mentality. The paper presents some deep aspects of the formation of a communicative culture in the traditions of the East, the study of which is of particular interest in the context of the growing need for successful intercultural communication. Communicative behaviour is analysed in the context of the correlation of language and culture, language and national mentality, language and consciousness. The practical significance of the study is determined by the need to form a global communicative space and structure the worldview aspect of intercultural interaction

Feature-based generation of pervasive systems architectures utilizing software product line concepts

As the need for pervasive systems tends to increase and to dominate the computing discipline, software engineering approaches must evolve at a similar pace to facilitate the construction of such systems in an efficient manner. In this thesis, we provide a vision of a framework that will help in the construction of software product lines for pervasive systems by devising an approach to automatically generate architectures for this domain. Using this framework, designers of pervasive systems will be able to select a set of desired system features, and the framework will automatically generate architectures that support the presence of these features. Our approach will not compromise the quality of the architecture especially as we have verified that by comparing the generated architectures to those manually designed by human architects. As an initial step, and in order to determine the most commonly required features that comprise the widely most known pervasive systems, we surveyed more than fifty existing architectures for pervasive systems in various domains. We captured the most essential features along with the commonalities and variabilities between them. The features were categorized according to the domain and the environment that they target. Those categories are: General pervasive systems, domain-specific, privacy, bridging, fault-tolerance and context-awareness. We coupled the identified features with well-designed components, and connected the components based on the initial features selected by a system designer to generate an architecture. We evaluated our generated architectures against architectures designed by human architects. When metrics such as coupling, cohesion, complexity, reusability, adaptability, modularity, modifiability, packing density, and average interaction density were used to test our framework, our generated architectures were found comparable, if not better than the human generated architectures