Chinese Students' Perceptions of Using Mobile Devices for English Learning

The advance of mobile technology has turned portable, handheld devices into an integral part of students' daily life, and also paved the way for the rise of mobile assisted language learning. This study focused on how Chinese students perceive the use of using mobile devices for English practice in and out of class, in order to see whether they are interested in mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) and how they construct the technology with regard to English learning. One hundred and one students from eighteen universities in mainland China participated in this study. All of them completed an anonymous questionnaire and 20 randomly selected students were interviewed. The results illuminate a strong motivation among students for learning English via mobiles, and diverse types of m-learning activities were discovered. The results also revealed that students' attitudes toward mobile learning can be impacted by their regions or more specifically their surroundings

Learning with Mobiles in Developing Countries: Technology, Language, and Literacy

In the countries of the global South, the challenges of fixed infrastructure and environment, the apparent universality of mobile hardware, software and network technologies and the rhetoric of the global knowledge economy have slowed or impoverished the development of appropriate theoretical discourses to underpin learning with mobiles. This paper addresses one specific and fundamental component of such discourses, namely the role of language and literacy as they interact with mobile technology. The paper makes three points, that mobile technology is culturally and linguistically specific, not universal or culturally-neutral; that mobile technology does not merely store and transmit language(s) and literacy within communities, it disturbs and transforms them, and that the digital literacy agenda that might underpin learning with mobiles has not yet been developed in relation to mobile technology or in relation to the global South. These are the foundations of understanding learning with mobiles in the global South