Language learning and technology. Student activities in web-based environments

The impact of the web as a communicative arena, based on the use of social software, has changed conditions for communication on all levels of society; privately, at work and in education. This has opened up for multicultural communication, frequently with English as the lingua franca. Exploring how the web and web-based technologies afford learning activities is something that is related to practical and theoretical interests in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). These interests are also the foundation for this thesis. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of how web-based environments can change the conditions for language learning. Within a socio-cultural framework, the thesis explores activities and student interaction in web-based learning environments in language learning for engineering students in higher education in Sweden. The main research question is how web-based language learning activities contribute to the development of language competences. There are four more specific questions: How are web-based technologies situated in language learning environments? What forms of activities and student interaction evolve? How can web-based peer reviewing contribute to language learning? How can intercultural exchanges contribute to language learning? The empirical foundation of the thesis comprises four case studies of educational designs including student activities in blogs and wikis. Data consists of logs of student driven web-based activities and interviews. The first study investigates how students use a wiki as their joint workspace. The results show that the students either use the web page or the discussion forum on the wiki, entailing both a form-based and a content-based focus. Three types of activity patterns emerge: contributing and writing together; evaluating and peer reviewing; and arguing and discussing. The second study explores rationalities of student co-production of texts on a wiki. The patterns of interaction in groups can be characterized either as co-operation or collaboration. The results show that the collaborating groups are more frequent in giving peer response. When writing together, collaboration with contributions from diverse perspectives changes the dynamics not only of text production but the text in itself. This has potential for language learning since the students become involved in many levels of text production, from very detailed linguistic aspects to discursive and semantic aspects. The third study investigates student interaction in a poetry blog exchange with native-English speaking students from the US. In the blogging activity, the students share their interpretation of poems by a Swedish poet. The analysis of the blog postings uncovers four themes of student interaction: blogging in an educational environment; displaying cultural belonging; forming threads that thematize content and meaning of poems; and discussions of language and translation issues in an intercultural environment. Study four investigates an intercultural exchange, targeting student peer-reviewing in a wiki. The procedure of giving comments to and receiving comments from peer students from another culture offers diversity to text revision processes. Being engaged in an intercultural peer review exchange offers opportunities in getting an insight into different ways of expression, conditions of giving and receiving feedback, cultural differences when meeting someone from outside of one’s own disciplinary field and from another country and with another language background. This is in line with core issues of intercultural exchanges that concern mastering expressions of other cultures than one’s own. The four studies contribute to the understanding of how web-based environments can be used in language learning. They display a range of productive student interaction such as discussing, collaborating, and responding through text. In conclusion, they demonstrate that educational designs utilizing web-based writing technologies offer a space to develop discursive, linguistic and cultural competences

Using TPACK for Analysing Teachers’ Task Design – Understanding Change in a 1:1-Laptop Setting

This paper investigates one aspect from a longitudinal study concerning a 1:1-project in two secondary schools in Sweden. The paper has three aims; firstly, to investigate if the educational tasks in a 1:1-classroom are recontextualized to reflect the new conditions of the practice, secondly, to test the TPACK-framework as a potentially useful lens for analysing teachers’ work with task design and finally to offer guidelines for designing tasks in a 1:1 setting. The design of this study proved valuable for testing TPACK as a lens as well as exploring how teacher competencies have effect on educational activities within a 1:1 laptop setting. The paper also contributes to the practice field as it gives guidelines for task design in a 1:1 setting

Language learning in a wiki: Student contributions in a web based learning environment

Emerging social writing platforms offer possibilities for language learners to collaborate around joint assignments. One such environment is the wiki, generally hosting two prominent modes of usage, web pages and discussion forums. This study investigates software engineering students’ use of a wiki as an integrated tool within the frames of a language course. The purpose of the case study was to investigate the student interaction in a student driven design setting and what the implications are for language learning in such an environment. The findings show that the two modes of interaction host primarily three types of activity, contributing and writing together, evaluating and peer reviewing, and arguing and discussing. These three activities convey different ways of collaborating and sharing text online. Once a group had chosen a mode for their collaboration, they tend to stay with it throughout their work

A Design for Intercultural Exchange – An Analysis of Engineering Students’ Interaction with English Majors in a Poetry Blog

Web based writing platforms allowing for exchanges across the world are increasingly being used in education. These recent forms of textual practice are highly related to conditions offered by the technology, allowing users, who previously were primarily consumers, to become producers of text. This chapter investigates student interaction over a blog in an intercultural student exchange between native speakers and nonnative speakers of English in higher education analysing and interpreting poetry. The groups of students involved in this study belong not only to different academic disciplines, but also differ in terms of nationality and language background. In the blog posts, the students’ cultural voices are heard, offering a meeting between very contrasting groups. Scrutinising thestudent postings, the threaded discussions show ways that students thematise content and meaning in the poems. The results show that there are a number of features at play in an intercultural environment where language and translation issues are prominent parts of the student discussions, offering extended perspectives to the students’ initial views. Collaborative efforts in such a diverse environment are important when negotiating meaning and extending students’ understanding of poetry