Bringing the world into the institution: Mobile intercultural learning for staff and students

© 2012 Emerald Group Publishing Limited. This case study describes how available mobile technology (students\u27 own camera phones) can be used to enhance learners\u27 input into the curriculum and to promote intercultural learning among university staff as well as among students. The students at Zayed University are local Emirati women, while the members of the university staff come from many countries around the world. Each year new staff arrive with little knowledge about the local culture, and their orientation course has usually involved the university giving them basic information about their students\u27 cultural background. Recently however we have tried to tap into students\u27 worlds by using their own familiar technology: their mobile phone camera. We invited students to send us a photograph taken on their mobile phone which would give new, foreign staff insight into the world of their new students. The resulting images became the starting point for a dialogue between the new staff and students. This was followed up with a more extended writing task for students, based around an image from their phone. The images created and selected by students were interpreted by incoming staff as glimpses of a foreign culture, often in ways which revealed the staff\u27s own preconceptions. Staff\u27s questions to students about these images, and the responses obtained, showed both convergence in the understandings of the two groups, and an opening up of what is understood by \u27\u27local culture.\u27\u27 In this dialogue, processes of mobile, autonomous learning begin as the students use their new language (English) to explain their culture to the highly educated cultural neophytes who are the staff

Family, friends, and learning beyond the classroom: Social networks and social capital in language learning

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011. Language learning beyond the classroom is often seen as a pursuit of target language resources such as reading materials or native speakers, and these clearly have a role to play. However, this chapter focuses on another key element which mediates access to these other resources: patterns of interaction with other people, analysed here as social networks. Language learning beyond the classroom is not unstructured; on the contrary, it is structured by the contexts in which a learner uses and internalizes the language, and by the strategies which the learner uses to pursue her goals within particular contexts. In order to understand learning beyond the classroom, we need to consider how learners interact with ‘significant othersa’ (other people who are often more significant to them than their teachers are). For the female Arabic learners from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) described in this chapter, their family and friends play a key role in their learning outside the classroom

The Ecology of Learner Autonomy

Learner autonomy has been defined as ‘the ability to take charge of one’s own learning’ (Holec 1981: 3). This fairly open definition has sometimes phased into stronger definitions along the same lines, for example: ‘the situation in which the learner is totally responsible for all of the decisions concerned with his [sic] learning and the implementation of those decisions’ (Dickinson 1987:11) — a definition couched in terms of a situation rather than the ability of an individual

Learner autonomy and groups

© The Author(s) 2018. Working in groups is a popular teaching strategy associated with communicative, task-based and other approaches in ELT. Learner autonomy has also become an influential concept and has been linked to groupwork. However, ideas about how learner autonomy (often seen as a set of skills in an individual) might develop through groupwork have tended to develop by practice and intuition more than through research. This chapter will consider some relevant questions about learner autonomy and groupwork, for example, individual autonomy in a group, learner support, autonomy development, group autonomy and conditions for group and individual autonomy. It will also discuss research approaches which have proved useful in other fields and how these might be applied in language learning and teaching contexts