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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides a thorough overview of digital learning methods and their practical application in the modern language classroom English Language Learning in the Digital Age is a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical background and real-world application of IDLE (Informal Digital Learning of English). Designed for teachers and future teachers preparing to teach English as a second or other language, this highly practical guide focuses on incorporating digital technology into curricula to draw upon the extracurricular exposures to English that many students experience outside of the classroom. With some creativity and care, teachers can find ways to bring these experiences with English into the classroom, ultimately improving student learning outcomes. Offering a specific focus on examples and case studies drawn from language education in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, this text employs a three-part structure beginning with the theories behind autonomous learning and the importance of informal language learning for young adults. Part two demonstrates various methods for integrating games, social media, e-books, language software, mobile apps, and other digital resources into the classroom. The third section addresses the use of IDLE methods to bridge the gap between informal and formal uses of English, the advantages and disadvantages of IDLE in flipped classrooms and online teaching, and how IDLE strategies can enhance mandated curricula and better prepare students for national exams. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the future of language learning and the need to include digital technologies and learner-driven strategies in education policy. This unique text: * Offers practical methods for bringing informal student learning into the classroom * Presents a wide range of engaging digital learning activities that can complement traditional language courses and improve language acquisition * Reviews mobile apps for the translation and practice of vocabulary, grammar, and other components of language learning * Provides real-life examples of how teachers can develop lessons and curricula, such as watching and making vlogs and reading transcripts of podcasts and audiobooks * Includes access to a companion website containing video interviews with English learners and teaching plans reflecting TESOL Technology Standards and CEFR Reference Level Descriptors for English English Language Learning in the Digital Age is an ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of language education and language acquisition, as well as teachers and teachers-in-training who are preparing to teach English in countries where English is not the primary language.
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English Language Learning in the Digital Age
Learner-Driven Strategies for Adolescents and Young Adults
Mark Dressman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL
Ju Seong Lee Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Laurent Perrot University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
This edition first published 2023
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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For our mothers
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Part I Introduction: Informal Digital Learning of English and Its Implications
1 The Age of IDLE and the IDLE Age
2 Seeing and Hearing the English All Around Us
3 Complementarity: Tradition and Innovation in English Learning and Teaching
Part II IDLE in the Classroom
4 Songs, Video, and Vlogging
5 Audiobooks, E-Books, and Podcasting
6 Social Networking and Ethical/Safety Considerations
7 Games and Other Virtual Learning Environments
8 Mobile Apps: Translation, Vocabulary, and Grammar
Part III Language Curriculum in the Digital Age
9 Beyond the Pandemic: Online and Flipped Learning
10 From IDLE to Academic Literacy
11 Curriculum, Assessment, and Professional Development in the Age of IDLE
12 Autonomous, Informal Learning and the Future of English Language Education
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
CHAPTER 02
Table 2.1 Comparison of learning...
CHAPTER 03
Table 3.1 Analysis of academic...
Table 3.2 Analysis of extramural...
Table 3.3 Hybrid, blended academic...
CHAPTER 04
Table 4.1 Rubric for process...
Table 4.2 Group use of...
Table 4.3 Individual participation and...
Table 4.4 Rubric to assess...
CHAPTER 05
Table 5.1 Rubric for assessment...
Table 5.2 Rubric for assessment...
Table 5.3 Assessment of group...
Table 5.4 Assessment of students...
Table 5.5 Assessment of the...
Table 5.6 Individual assessment of...
CHAPTER 06
Table 6.1 Rubric for student...
Table 6.2 Rubric for multimodal...
Table 6.3 Rubric for homework...
Table 6.4 Rubric to assess...
CHAPTER 07
Table 7.1 Rubric for assessing...
Table 7.2 Rubric for assessing...
Table 7.3 Rubric for assessing...
Table 7.4 Rubric for summative...
CHAPTER 08
Table 8.1 Rubric for assessment...
Table 8.2 Ongoing (formative) assessment...
Table 8.3 Rubric for assessment...
Table 8.4 Rubric for assessment...
Table 8.5 Rubric to assess...
Table 8.6 Rubric to assess...
CHAPTER 09
Table 9.1 Comparison of four...
Table 9.2 Summative assessment for...
Table 9.3 Formative assessment of...
Table 9.4 Assessment of student...
Table 9.5 Formative assessment of...
CHAPTER 10
Table 10.1 Assessment of student...
Table 10.2 Formative assessment of...
Table 10.3 Assessment of student...
Table 10.4 Assessment of student...
Table 10.5 Formative assessment of...
CHAPTER 11
Table 11.1 Progression of English...
Table 11.2 Assessment of group...
Table 11.3 Informal assessment of...
Table 11.4 Assessment of group...
Table 11.5 Individual assessment of...
Table 11.6 Individual assessment of...
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 12
Figure 12.1 Overview of the history...
Figure 12.2 Some journal publishers...
Guide
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Figures
12.1 Overview of the history of methods in English language education, pre-1900 to the present
12.2 Some journal publishers now offer translations of articles in multiple languages
List of Tables
2.1 Comparison of learning contexts by five features of IDLE
3.1 Analysis of academic/formal English activities across modes, monitoring/rehearsal, time and materials, and autonomy/engagement
3.2 Analysis of extramural/informal English activities across modes, monitoring/rehearsal, time and materials, and transferability
3.3 Hybrid, blended academic/formal and extramural/informal English language activities across modes, monitoring, format, autonomy/engagement, and transferability
3.4 IDLE and chapter topics: TESOL Technology Standards for Language Learners coverage,Chapters 4–11
3.5 IDLE and chapter topics: Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scales,Chapters 4–11
4.1 Rubric for process and final vlog
4.2 Group use of conditionals and conceptual thinking in PowerPoint presentations
4.3 Individual participation and performance
4.4 Rubric to assess accuracy and quality of the group presentation
5.1 Rubric for assessment of students’ reading comprehension
5.2 Rubric for assessment of the e-book and audio pairing within a reading workshop
5.3 Assessment of group work to reduce summaries and record discussions and reading
5.4 Assessment of students’ individual, original summaries
5.5 Assessment of the group podcast
5.6 Individual assessment of student pronunciation and speaking fluency
6.1 Rubric for student post and comments
6.2 Rubric for multimodal report
6.3 Rubric for homework assignment
6.4 Rubric to assess the quality of each three-student blog
7.1 Rubric for assessing group performance
7.2 Rubric for assessing group performance for the final project
7.3 Rubric for assessing individual performance on the project
7.4 Rubric for summative assessment of their performance after three practice sessions
8.1 Rubric for assessment of group performance in vocabulary activity
8.2 Ongoing (formative) assessment of group activity
8.3 Rubric for assessment of group translation exercise
8.4 Rubric for assessment of individual student notes
8.5 Rubric to assess key terms and phrases in group phrasebooks
8.6 Rubric to assess individual student use of phrasebook
9.1 Comparison of four modes of teaching and learning
9.2 Summative assessment for student tours
9.3 Formative assessment of student communication during the tour project
9.4 Assessment of student e-books
9.5 Formative assessment of student understanding of vocabulary and concepts
10.1 Assessment of student peer-editing
10.2 Formative assessment of assignment for student engagement and productivity
10.3 Assessment of student performance
10.4 Assessment of student essays about National Assembly policy
10.5 Formative assessment of activity process and online discussions
11.1 Progression of English language education methods x language theory, teaching, learning, contexts, and assessments
11.2 Assessment of group analyses and reports
11.3 Informal assessment of individual student participation
11.4 Assessment of group question writing
11.5 Individual assessment of students’ ability to explain their answer choices
11.6 Individual assessment of student response to RFP
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our deep gratitude to the following individuals who read parts of this book as it was being written and contributed valuable ideas and feedback across multiple stages of conceptualization, writing, and editing: Siobhán O’Sullivan, Khalifa Ahmed Al Shehhi, Fazal Rizvi, Christian Torres, Sydney Sadler, Carrie James, Chen Chen Lu, Mohamed Mahna, Rao Dingxin, Samy Hassim, Ian Westbury, Robb Lindgren, Lynn Burdick, Yassine Hamdane, and Mohamed Ezzghari. Thank you, dear and generous friends.
Part I Introduction: Informal Digital Learning of English and Its Implications
1 The Age of IDLE and the IDLE Age
Four independent digital learners of English (IDLERs) at a university library in Morocco. Note the combined use of smartphones and notebooks and the computer with plug-in modem.
Introduction and Plan for the Book
Taking a Learner-Driven Approach
This book is about the integration of instructional technology, often abbreviated as IT, or sometimes ICT (information and communications technology) with English language instruction in classroom settings, but it takes a different approach from most books on the subject. In a typical Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) or Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) approach, the focus is “top-down” and often technology-driven, with additional concern for research-derived theories and principles of language acquisition and learning, almost exclusively within formal classroom settings.
Our approach in this book is quite different and somewhat unique. It takes a “bottom-up” view of how, over the past two decades, learners across the globe have increasingly relied on the informal use of information and communications technology to both acquire and learn English outside classroom settings. Inspired by our own research and that of others, this book takes a “learner-driven” approach, focusing on strategies adapted from what adolescents and young adults tell researchers about how they are learning English while playing video games, watching television and movies, and chatting with others online when they are not in the classroom, and how this learning contributes to their success in the classroom. These strategies are powerful, not only because their grounding in the interests and social behaviors of learners makes them highly motivating, but because they effectively solve many of the logistical issues that have persistently challenged formal language instruction for over a century, such as regular, inexpensive access to authentic sources of input, and opportunities for interaction with more proficient speakers.
In keeping with this bottom-up, learner-driven approach, each chapter begins with a series of fictional but research-based, authentic portraits of English learners and their teachers using digital technologies in the early twenty-first century. We follow these portraits with a discussion of current research and theory in second language acquisition and CALL and conclude the chapters of Part II and the first three chapters of Part III with three scenarios for teaching at the middle, secondary, and tertiary levels. Although the specific focus of these is on the learning of adolescents and young adults, many of the scenarios (especially those in middle schools) are easily adaptable for primary school settings.
Our goal in writing this book, then, is to provide an approach to the integration of CALL and MALL that is naturalistic in focus, highly readable and engaging, and grounded in cutting-edge research and theory on second language acquisition and learning. We welcome you, our readers, into a world of English language learning and teaching that embodies the full potential of ubiquitous technologies and autonomous learning in the early twenty-first century.
Imagine This
Team Teaching in Taipei
Li Mei (Liz) Wang is a middle-school English teacher in Taipei, Taiwan. Li Mei was born in Taiwan, but when she was nine, she emigrated with her family to the United States and settled in Chicago, where she became known by her schoolmates and teachers as Liz. Li Mei graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in primary education but in her early 20s her family returned to Taiwan and Li Mei followed them, lured by a new program aimed at increasing the English proficiency of students by teaming teachers from English-speaking countries with Taiwanese teachers.
Li Mei is enjoying her return to Taiwan and is charmed by her new students, who are fascinated not only by her bilingualism but by her bicultural habits, and who shyly quiz her about life in the United States. However, she is troubled by the English curriculum, which is focused more on grammatical rules than on communication, and by some of her colleagues who lack Li Mei’s fluency and insist on continuing to teach English from the textbook.
In her conversations with students, which are conducted partly in Taiwanese dialect and partly in English, Li Mei has discovered that her students are gaining quite a bit of English receptively from online sources, especially video streaming, online gaming, and music videos. Along with Japanese anime, Hallyu, and Taiwanese stars, her students are avid fans of Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and Drake. They tell her they grew up watching My Little Pony and SpongeBob SquarePants and now watch The Voice on television every week, and that they “try to understand without reading the subtitles.” Moreover, she has discovered that her students’ curiosity and engagement with these sources of English contrast sharply with their demeanor and performance in formal English classes, where they are reluctant to speak and seem to struggle with English grammar exercises.
In weekly meetings, Li Mei has suggested finding ways to use materials from popular culture or even trying to use captioned videos in classes, but her ideas have not been accepted. One colleague suggested that she should “save those ideas for the English club.” Another was more direct. “That is not good English,” the teacher told her. “We teach correct English.” Another asked Li Mei why teachers should “take time for SpongeBob” in their classrooms when students were “doing that on their own.” Class time, she was told, was “for serious study, not playing around.” Li Mei also discussed the matter with her school director, who smiled and told her, “Your job is to help students with their fluency and pronunciation. Leave the rest of the teaching to the older teachers.”
A Bilingual Bachillerato in Spain
Miguel Días teaches English and physics in a bilingual bachillerato, or upper-grades high school, located on the outskirts of Cordoba, Spain. The school only opened in 2019 and is part of the Spanish national government’s efforts to increase the English proficiency of students, especially those intending to major in the sciences at university. Miguel, who studied physics as an undergraduate, spent three summers with relatives in Miami as a teenager and “picked up” English during those visits, from high school and a few university English classes, and from playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) through much of his time at the university. For the past two summers, he has participated in a TESOL certification program at a British university, where his fluency and ability to write in English have increased dramatically.
Miguel has thought deeply about his own learning processes as part of his professional development. His position is 50% in the English department and 50% in physics, and he is required to teach at least 30% of physics content in English. He typically introduces subjects in Spanish but later reviews and tries to extend the same concepts in English through a variety of means, including video clips and articles from Scientific American, National Geographic, and other popular sources. Khan Academy, which offers videos on much of the content in his classes in both English (with captions) and Spanish, has become an important resource for him and for his students, especially for review.
However, Miguel’s teaching as well as the bilingual program of the school have recently come under criticism, not only in the press and popular opinion but from some parents and from his colleagues in both English and physics. Miguel has heard that some of his colleagues in English have mocked his “gringo” (American) accent and occasional errors in usage and grammar. They also cite recent articles in Spanish newspapers about the failure of Spanish schools to teach a British standard of English—despite their own frequent lack of a Castilian accent in Spanish. His colleagues in physics, on the other hand, have challenged the “rigor” of his teaching, arguing that the “simplification” of content required for instruction in English is a disservice to students preparing to study science and engineering at university. In addition, some parents have complained that their children’s poor background in English places them at a disadvantage compared to other students whose parents can afford to send their children to English-speaking countries on holiday or pay for private classes at English centers.
These complaints have left Miguel distracted and discouraged, but they have not weakened his determination or enthusiasm for teaching his students. He has noticed that a number are learning to speak “California dialect,” nurtured by their fondness for pirated television series like “Breaking Bad,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” or the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise, as well as several Latinx and Caribbean hip-hop artists and pop singers who move effortlessly in their lyrics from Spanish to English and back. They, in turn, are embracing highly communicative forms of English expression that, Miguel knows, may or may not help them in their future university careers, but in the meantime offer them release from the inauthenticity of the topics in their English textbooks, such as “A Trip to the Bakery” or “The Story of the Premier League.”
Preparatory English in Abu Dhabi
Rakel de Silva has been a lecturer in the English preparatory program at a major private university in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, for more than a decade. Her family was originally from Kerala, on the southwest coast of India, but Rakel’s father attended university in the United States to study engineering when she was a small child and she grew up speaking both Malayalam and English. She and her husband, who is a physician, have been expatriates living in Abu Dhabi since 2005. Rakel has degrees in English and applied linguistics from US universities. She was hired in 2008 as one of the first English instructors shortly after the university was founded, and she feels deeply invested in the education of her students, in her colleagues, and in the preparatory program.
However, Rakel is worried that Prep English is in danger at her university and that her program may soon be discontinued or reduced in size and impact. For over two decades, preparatory programs in Abu Dhabi and across the UAE served as “bridges” for high school graduates with weak skills, mostly in English and mathematics, to meet the entrance requirements of four-year university programs. These English programs were TESOL-based, in which students would be assessed and grouped according to their level, and the instructor would focus on specific skill areas such as vocabulary, writing, and general speaking skills in an effort to raise students’ general IELTS score to a level of 6.0.
In recent years, however, fewer students have entered the university needing Prep English, and those who do enter have significantly higher scores than students of a decade before. As a result, the government has begun to reduce funding for preparatory programs and plans to eliminate them entirely in the coming years.
Rakel, her colleagues, and the program’s director are unsure about how to respond to these developments. Some of her peers joke bittersweetly that they have “taught themselves out of a job,” while the government attributes students’ improved scores to reforms in secondary schools and more English-curriculum high schools. Rakel, who frequently talks with her students about how they have learned English both in and out of class, has noticed an alternative pattern: Her most proficient and fluent students spend significant amounts of time listening to western music in English, watching programs in English on YouTube, Netflix, or MBC, or playing MMORPGs. She has also watched over the years as English has become the lingua franca of Abu Dhabi, allowing the emirate’s large expatriate community of Filipino and South Asian workers to communicate with each other, with native Emiratis, and with westerners with relatively few problems.
Rakel’s concern for the decline of Prep English extends beyond worries about job security or the loss of colleagues. She has long wondered if the remedial nature of the program has not “pumped up” test scores without providing students with the additional skills they will need to succeed in their later university careers and professionally. Professors in the sciences and humanities routinely describe the challenges their students face in reading and writing in their disciplines. They point out that the simple term papers or group writing assignments on general topics offered in the undergraduate English program do not prepare students to write in professional contexts, such as reports or proposals in which hard data, charts, graphs, and language must be integrated, and in which the form of presentation is digital and visual rather than simply print- and paper-based.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Rakel’s university moved to online instruction, which provided Rakel with a laboratory and the incentive to redesign her assignments and her teaching. Instead of a general focus on “communication,” Rakel created assignments in which students were required to do online research and data-based writing about specific, disciplinary-related topics and to write in new genres, creating reports for authentic academic and work-related contexts. Technical issues and a prohibition against students turning on their cameras from home led to presentation assignments in which students produced animated, narrated PowerPoint videos and uploaded them to YouTube (unlisted) for Rakel and classmates to watch. Rakel discovered that several of her students already had their own YouTube channels and were producing content, and that all her students were unable to create informative, lively, multimodal texts on their own.
Rakel counts her experiment with redesigning English at her university a major success and has shared her process and examples of student work with her colleagues. She has argued in meetings that this is the path forward for the continued relevance of English at her university. But now that the university is slowly reopening and some classes are being taught face to face again, it is uncertain whether her colleagues and director will redesign the program as a whole and make the case to university administrators for its continuation.
A Brave New World for English Learning and Teaching
These three fictional scenarios, all based on authentic developments in their country settings and worldwide, illustrate both challenges and opportunities for learning and teaching English as a second or additional language in the early twenty-first century (Menárguez 2021; Nagarajan 2021; Tzu-ti 2021). Less than thirty years ago in most parts of the non-English-speaking world, it was typical for an English teacher and a textbook to be a student’s primary if not only sources of English. Instruction often did not begin until middle or high school, and classrooms were considered well-equipped if each had its own overhead projector and screen. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT; Richards 2005) was an innovation in some countries, whereas in others Grammar-Translation methods (Benati 2018) prevailed. If a teacher wanted to use some additional media, they might bring a cassette or CD player to class to teach a song or sometimes show an educational film. In the best-equipped schools there might be a language lab, with individual audio tapes for listening, and/or reading along, to stories, essays, or conversations written to teach specific vocabulary and grammatical structures. In these conditions, a student might never hear or read English spoken or written in authentic, naturalistic language unless they watched an imported television program or movie with subtitles, or listened to the BBC or Voice of America on shortwave radio.
Revolutions in digital communications and affordable intercontinental travel from the early 1990s onward at first slowly and then very rapidly changed the context of English education globally (World101 n.d.). Satellite television first brought English-language programs and movies into many homes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Students in more affluent homes might be able to spend summer holidays with their relatives in English-speaking countries, or their English-speaking cousins might visit them. As the internet spread across the globe from the early 1990s onward, internet cafes sprang up, offering access to a growing range of websites, chat rooms, and games to play. Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) brought the internet into people’s homes, first through telephone lines and later through optic cable, and as bandwidth improved it became increasingly feasible to stream video on YouTube (late 2005) and later through a wide range of streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Viki Rakuten, TenCent, and others.
Did You Know?
The first form of electronic communication, the telegraph (invented 1844), used the same binary system of dots and dashes (zeroes and ones) as all computer-based communication systems today.
Source: Eschner 2019
When the iPhone and then Android smartphones debuted in 2007, the internet became available to anyone with a smartphone, and almost anywhere (for a price). Today, for anyone with a smartphone and a data plan, nearly all the world’s games, movies, television shows, books, shopping, languages, and much of its population, are accessible at a moment’s search. There are of course some limitations: in some parts of the world, services are limited and others are banned, smartphones and data plans are not affordable in others, and in some places the internet may still be difficult to access; but these limitations pale in the face of what is available to most people most of the time globally.
Differences in perception and world view between those born before and after 1995 are enormous and should not be underestimated. The world simply looks different to most people born since 1995, and if the world does not often function differently and its institutions typically operate as though they were still in the 1970s, that is because they originated in the pre-digital era and are largely controlled by people who were born in that era as well. So, too, it is with schools and the education system in most parts of the world, and so, too, with the curriculum, including the teaching of languages, and in particular, English.
Take, for example, the TESOL Technology Standards Framework, to which the scenarios and activities of this textbook are referenced (Healey et al. 2008). They were published in 2008, a year after the introduction of smartphones, and were authored by scholars who were most certainly born before 1995. Although over a decade old, for the most part they remain relevant; yet as we worked through the Standards, we could not help but notice how they also seem tentative and to be permeated with fear about the lack of availability of resources in some cases, and in others, of how technology will be used. For example, it is stated, “To sum up, the Technology Standards can provide an opportunity for the ELT community to clarify expectations regarding the integration of technology in teaching and learning” (our italics; 10). There is a focus on “basic operational skills” (Goal 1, Standard 1), as though most teachers and students had never browsed the internet or word processed before and needed instruction in how to use the equipment, and the admonition to “use appropriate caution when using online sources” (Goal 1, Standard 3), as well as understanding “that communication conventions differ across cultures, communities and contexts” (Goal 2, Standard 1), and finally to “respect” and “appropriately use and evaluate” technology tools (Goal 3). The general implication is that technology is a new and possibly useful but also possibly dangerous “tool” that must be approached with care, something outside the classroom that might offer value, but that must be brought under control.
The view that digital technology is more than simply a tool—that it is a principal medium and increasingly the source itself of English language instruction and learning—is not anticipated in these Standards, but it is the perspective of this book, and, we have strong reason to believe, the reality in which all English language teachers in the coming decades will work. This is primarily for two reasons.
The first is the Covid-19 pandemic, which has driven classroom teaching online across much of the world. It is very true that during this period educators, students, and parents all over the world have discovered how unprepared education was for a move to formal digital education: that is, how limited in terms of human contact, instructional interaction, and opportunities for socialization online teaching can be, and how time-consuming preparation of materials for delivery is. Yet at the same time it has also become clear how digital technology made formal instruction possible at all during shutdowns, how easy it is to make and archive materials that can be revised and used again and again, and how critical learner motivation is for any learning to occur at all. For innovative teachers and curriculum developers during this period, other important lessons about the need to combine visual images and speech during instruction as well as how digital tools facilitate this process, have become clear. It seems unlikely that, post pandemic, formal education will go back to exactly the way it was before, and, more likely, some hybridization will develop in which perhaps the more didactic aspects of teaching and learning like lecturing stay online while class time is used for more process-oriented activities.
During the Covid-19 Pandemic
188 countries closed schools.
More than 90% of countries adopted digital/broadcast remote learning.
Only 69% of primary and secondary schoolchildren were reached by digital or broadcast means.
75% of children not reached were from rural or impoverished backgrounds.
1 billion+ students risked falling behind in their education.
Source: Adapted from UNICEF Education and Covid-19, 2020
A second and perhaps more lasting and significant reason for English language education is that, well before the pandemic, many students across the globe were already learning as much if not more English digitally and/or through sustained contact with other more proficient speakers than in classrooms. These learners, as studies across the world have shown, develop, larger vocabularies, and greater spoken fluency in English than peers who have less access to these resources or who are less motivated to seek them out. The findings of these studies challenge some basic assumptions of English language instruction, such as the difficulty of learning English as a foreign language and the need for structured, logically ordered language curricula; and it is perhaps for this reason or perhaps because many of the studies are very recent that their implications or the approaches to learning have not, until now, been featured in textbooks on instructional technology and language learning.
To introduce the implications of these studies, and especially to introduce their focus on learner-drivenstrategies for learning English, we will briefly describe studies from five countries, followed by an introductory discussion of their implications and finally, the plan for this book.
Chapter Objectives
The central goal of this chapter is to introduce readers to the global phenomenon of Informal Digital Learning of English (IDLE) and its implications for classroom teaching. A subgoal is to understand the global implications of IDLE as a topic of research in five countries. A second subgoal is to introduce how IDLE promotes language learning/acquisition through five features. A third subgoal is to begin to imagine new roles for teachers and students in classrooms that integrate IDLE into their instructional practices. The final subgoal of the chapter is to introduce readers to the organization of the book. By the end of this introductory chapter, readers should be able to:
Describe the extent of digital technology’s impact on English language education globally.
Describe research studies in five countries on IDLE and its implications for formal education.
Explain the role of five features of IDLE as a practice in learning the English language.
Describe ways that IDLE can positively impact formal English language education.
Describe the organization of the book as a map for integrating IDLE and IDLE-like practices into classroom teaching, now and into the future.
Key Words
informal digital learning of English (IDLE); learner-driven strategies; social connection; authenticity; autonomy; multimodality; ubiquity; co-learner
English Learners Today: Studies from Five Countries
Brazil
In Brazil, where Portuguese is the predominant language, students choose to study either English or Spanish in school, with English being offered in most private and some public schools, according to Bambirra (2017). Bambirra concluded that learning English is a “middle class aspiration” but also cited findings from a 2014 study by Data Popular Institute that “Brazilians believe that they do not learn English at regular schools and also that it is too expensive to pay for English private courses” (2). Overall, Brazil ranks Low (53/100 countries) on the English Proficiency Index (EF EPI 2021) and the average total score on the TOEFL iBT in 2019 was 87/120 (72.5/100; ETS 2019).
A study by Cole and Vanderplank (2016) suggests that an alternative source of English learning for many Brazilians derives increasingly from a wide range of digital resources, and that, in fact, Fully Autonomous Self-Instructed Learners (or FASILs), learn English better than Classroom-Trained Learners (or CTLs). Their study was a remarkable and convincing one, because unlike many studies, their participants (age 18–24) were either almost completely self-taught (having studied English in a classroom no more than a year) or they had studied at a private institute for a minimum of four years and reported not using digital media to learn English. The participants were all university students, and the two groups were matched in terms of their age, economic status, education, and professional goals.
Seven different measures of English proficiency were given to participants in both groups, including reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and usage, and fluency. A particular interest of the researchers concerned differences between the two groups’ use of “fossilized” structures, indicating the continuing influence of Portuguese on English communication. Finally, the participants were interviewed and answered a questionnaire about their motivation and attitudes about learning English.
Cole and Vanderplank found that FASILs scored significantly higher on all measures than did CTLs. Surprisingly, although no FASILs had been taught grammar formally, their ability to find and correct grammatical errors greatly exceeded the ability of formally taught CTLs. For one specific structure, “there is/are,” which is problematic for Portuguese speakers, 88.2% of FASILs demonstrated an acquired knowledge of the structure compared to 55.1% of CTLs. They concluded, “The linguistic tests showed that while FASILs often acquire the nuances of the second language, CTLs frequently persist in deficiencies in acquisition common in Brazilian English learner dialect, seemingly hitting a barrier in terms of development” (40).
When Cole and Vanderplank compared the amount of time spent learning to proficiency, they found this made a difference in proficiency for CTLs but not FASILs, suggesting that it was not the time spent on the task but the mode of learning that accounted for FASILs better performance. Overall, three factors contributed to the differences between the two: internal extrinsic motivation; mode of learning; and number of years spent learning, as opposed to number of hours per week. They concluded, “Taken together, these findings challenge the current orthodoxy on the limitations of naturalistic language learning and highlight the extent to which the affordances of the internet have transformed the opportunities for informal, independent, high level foreign language acquisition” (41).
France
Although the French have a long-standing reputation for not speaking English well within Europe (where on the English Proficiency Index they rank 23rd of 34 countries), worldwide they rank 28th of 100 countries, second highest among the five countries discussed here. Foreign language education begins in the primary grades, where English competes with German and Spanish. Recent education reforms have called for the expansion of English in the curriculum. However, attitudes toward the French language (e.g., as a marker of cultural identity and a focus on stringently correct pronunciation) have traditionally raised a high affective filter (Krashen 1982) for learners of any foreign language in France.
There is evidence, however, that among some French university students, resistance to communicating in English is fading. Since the early 2010s, a team of researchers led by Geoffrey Sockett and Denyze Toffoli have studied the Online Informal Learning of English (OILE) by university students across multiple universities. In a pioneering study, Toffoli and Sockett (2010) surveyed 222 non-specialist students of English at the University of Strasbourg. Of the 222 students, only six reported not regularly using the internet in English. Ninety percent reported listening to English online at least once a month and 50% reported listening at least once a week. Most of the listening occurred while watching TV and movies in English, aimed at young adults from the United States. These programs were not dubbed or subtitled and were obtained largely through peer-to-peer networks in which pirated original materials (that were not dubbed or subtitled in French) predominated. These materials differed sharply, they noted, from instructional materials, in that they were far more engaging and that the motivation to comprehend them was for pleasure rather than specifically to study and learn English.
In terms of literacy, interaction through social media predominated, with most students reporting that they read or wrote on their own and other’s social media sites on a weekly or monthly basis. Few students reported problems with understanding what others wrote and agreed that they often used expressions and phrases in English they had picked up from others in their own posting online.
Sockett and Kusyk (2015) analyzed the fanfiction written by 45 computer science students in a French university. They found that students who were heavy viewers of US television series in English used more than twice as many “4-grams” (four-word phrases) commonly found in TV series as students who were infrequent viewers, and that more frequent viewers scored higher on tests of vocabulary knowledge. The students themselves also attributed much of their knowledge of, and proficiency in, English to frequent television viewing.
Republic of Korea
With its close ties to the United States and an export-driven economy, foreign-language education and especially English education is a cornerstone of the Republic of Korea’s education system. English is one of three principal subjects on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), the national college admissions exam. It is the focus of many hagwon or cram schools, which, along with the Ministry of Education, employ thousands of native speakers yearly. Korea ranks fourth among 24 Asian countries on the English Proficiency Index but only 32nd worldwide, and there are many cultural and historical factors that impede the use of English within Korea, including a fear of “showing off” and concerns about speaking with a Korean accent (Lee 2014). Generally, it is rare to encounter a Korean English speaker outside Seoul, and then only among some youth.
Anecdotally, however, it is equally rare to enter a coffee shop or convenience store near a university in Korea and meet a young adult worker who is not fully conversational in English. Ju Seong Lee (2019) interviewed 94 students at three Korean universities. He found that the diversity of the students’ online activities correlated positively with both their fluency and use of productive vocabulary when speaking. As a case study, Lee described the strategies of Su-ja, a student from a provincial capital, from a working-class background, who had received no formal English instruction beyond public school, but who had achieved 900 of 990 points on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). Su-ja reported that she had engaged in 21 different online English activities in the previous six months. As a child, she learned English through playing World of Warcraft and watching movies and television shows in English. She attributed 30% of her English learning to formal education and 70% to online activities.
Morocco
English is unofficially one of three “prestige languages” in the Kingdom of Morocco, along with Standard Arabic and French, but unlike them, it has no official standing. It has been taught in lycées, or high schools, since the early 1970s, and is now taught for two hours per week in the last year of college, or middle school. These factors account for its rank of 74/100 on the English Proficiency Index (but sixth of thirteen African countries). Nevertheless, English is very popular in Morocco, especially among many working-class youths who prefer it to French, which is spoken primarily among the upper class in major urban centers.
Dressman (2020) interviewed 107 students specializing in English at three universities about how they had learned English. On average, the students attributed nearly 60% of their English learning to informal activities. Students from urban homes (with greater access to digital media) attributed the highest percentage (64%) and students from rural areas the least (30% for females; 50% for males). There was a significant positive relationship between students’ reported percentage of informal learning and their TOEFL speaking scores, and between students’ reported use of social media and watching movies in English and their TOEFL speaking scores.
Students named 18 different types of English resources, most of them internet-based, from music to informational videos to lessons on grammatical points of English on YouTube to chat rooms, social media to satellite television, and live contact with English-speaking international friends and relatives. On average, students named more than five different sources they regularly used.
In some cases, their acquisition of English was incidental and in others very deliberate. One student described watching an American TV series, Zack and Cody, in English with Arabic subtitles for months until one day he turned his head from the screen, and still listening, realized he understood what was being said. Another student described listening to music lyrics and attempting to write them down, then checking what she had written against the official lyrics. A third student began to watch R-rated Hollywood movies to learn swear words that he would use in “battles” with friends in the street; his pronunciation and fluency were recognized by teachers at his high school, and he became a star of his debate club. In many cases, students described a long, slow process of listening and reading subtitles in Arabic, building a repertoire of phrases through repetition and rehearsal, followed by a knowledge base that took form and rapidly grew once formal instruction began in the last year of middle or first year of high school.
Sweden
Sweden ranks fourth in the world on the English Proficiency Index and is also fourth among European nations. Study of English begins early in primary school and English is one of three subjects that students are required to pass (along with Swedish and mathematics) to graduate from compulsory education. Yet, English is not a national language in Sweden, and although Swedes may use English to communicate with non-Swedish speakers, among themselves they speak almost exclusively in Swedish, especially at home.
Among Swedish researchers, the out-of-school English activities of students are described as Extramural English (or EE; Olsson 2012; Sundqvist 2009; Sundqvist and Sylvén 2012). Olsson (2012) studied 37 teenagers in their last years of compulsory schooling (aged 15–16) in Sweden. She found that nearly all students in the school engaged in some EE, but that those who engaged in higher amounts demonstrated significantly better writing ability. Sundqvist and Sylvén studied the relationship between online gaming by 86 students of English aged 11–12 in Sweden and found that students who were frequent gamers (five or more hours per week) outperformed students who gamed only moderately, and moderate gamers outperformed non-gamers on tests of English proficiency.
It’s Not “Magic”: How Informal Learning Works
Research into informal language learning worldwide is no more than 15 years old and still in its early stages. However, this brief review of studies from five different countries provides compelling evidence of its effectiveness in the acquisition of English by students across a wide variety of first languages, cultures, and educational systems. In addition, these studies suggest how robust informal, primarily digital sources are in the learning process, and how varied students’ processes of acquisition can be.
Digital Media Facts
The internet is used by 4.66 billion people—59.5% of the world population.
4.2 billion people use social media.
4.15 billion access social media with a mobile device.
2.9 billion people use Facebook; 2.56 billion use YouTube; 2 billion use WhatsApp (owned by Meta).
In a single minute on the internet:
–5,700,000 Google searches are conducted
–2,000,000 SnapChat messages are sent
–452,000 hours of Netflix are streamed
60% of the top 10 million websites are in English.
Source: Adapted from Statista Social Media, 2020
In some studies, such as in France and Sweden, acquisition of English seemed to be an incidental by-product of pleasure-driven activities, whereas in others such as Brazil, Korea, and Morocco, a combination of incidental and often highly deliberate strategies for learning predominated (in Morocco, some students described taking notes as they watched television or seeking online videos to learn grammar points). Cole and Vanderplank’s (2016) study in Brazil suggested that informal digital learning of English (or IDLE, as coined by Lee and Dressman 2018) on its own can produce more proficient speakers of English than classroom instruction. However, in their concluding discussion they do not discount the value of classroom-based input for most learners, and the students in all other studies had acquired English through a combination of formal classroom instruction and informal engagement with English.
Why and how does informal learning of English work? Based on a survey of the research to date, the process is not as “magical” as it seems, and a range of theoretical and analytical explanations are under development. The reasons why informal learning “works” is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2 of this book. For now, here are five main features of IDLE:
Social Connection.
Opportunities for meeting and identity construction apparent from one’s close circle of friends through international affinity groups such as fan clubs, gamers, and issues-oriented groups in which the lingua franca is English.
Authentic, Compelling, and Varied Input.
English input that is non-didactic (not created for educational purposes), that responds to the personal interests of a learner, and that is offered in a variety of formats, topics, and platforms.
Autonomy.
The opportunity for self-directed study at a pace and through processes created by the learner for specific purposes.
Multimodality.
The purposeful coordination of multiple modes of input (sound, speech, visual images, motion) within a single text to create an enhanced, supralinguistic experience.
Ubiquitous Access.
The ability to access and engage with input in English on demand, almost 24 hours per day and 7 days a week, often with control of the medium itself.
In summary, these five features are frequently named by informal learners as central to their learning experiences and success with English acquisition. In combination, they account for a very high percentage of the differences between formal and informal learning and are the focus of the learner-driven strategies in the methodological chapters of this book.
It’s Not a Panacea, Either
As revolutionary and exciting as the research on informal digital learning of English is, it is not our position, or the position of any researchers we are aware of, that it is time to abandon classroom teaching of English or any additional language and simply turn students loose with digital media, now or in the foreseeable future. Such a move would be irresponsible and unwarranted, because although recent research demonstrates beyond a doubt that it is possible to learn English solely through engagement with digital media, it is just as certain that for many other learners a totally informal path is not feasible, either because these learners lack the motivation, the time, or the talent for learning English on their own. In most studies, even the most successful informal learners have attributed a significant portion of their learning to classroom instruction, which provided structure, order, and accountability to their learning.
Reimagining English as a Learner-Driven Activity
Rather than abandoning classroom instruction, our position in the following chapters will be that digital media and the learner-driven strategies identified in current research on informal language learning are more complementary than conflicting with formal classroom instruction and curriculum. A digitally oriented, learner-driven approach offers an organic response to many of the serious limitations of classroom instruction that have troubled English language educators for decades. These are, namely, the need for authentic communicative materials and situations; greater autonomy on the part of learners and less dependence on teachers as the source of input; a need to embed and use language within a wide variety of contexts; and severe limitations on contact time in terms of both exposure to and practice with English.
Reimagining English as a learner-driven activity will entail more, however, than adopting a few teaching ideas adapted from the practices of self-taught English learners. At a very fundamental level, it will require educators to abandon the view that English is an extremely challenging and difficult language to learn, one that requires decades of study to develop any significant level of fluency, grammatical correctness, or accuracy in pronunciation. Certainly, languages that are more closely related to English have some advantage; but research shows that even speakers whose native language is Korean or a variety of Arabic benefit dramatically from engagement with digital resources that are authentic, of a wide variety, that are highly multimodal and ubiquitous, and that offer a great deal of choice and self-direction.
Additionally, it simply is not true, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, that textbooks and other classroom or teacher-developed materials are likely to be the primary sources of English language input for learners anymore, or that a highly controlled sequence of instruction is likely to achieve anything but severe boredom for students who have been spending their evenings watching Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad or Friends for hours on end with English captioning. Flexibility and openness to what students already know and, just as important, what they are curious about or don’t fully understand are key to developing a curriculum that keeps pace with and even anticipates and challenges learners at all levels of acquisition and access to informal learning opportunities.
Your Role as Teacher
Finally, it is not true that because increasing numbers of students are learning English on their own that the profession of English education has suddenly become obsolete and that English teachers will soon be out of a job, especially if the lessons of the digital revolution in language acquisition are incorporated into formal education in meaningful, consequential ways.
The greatest challenge facing English language teachers interested in taking advantage of the revolution in digital self-directed learning of English is the shift in role this requires. In the United States, L1 English teachers are often urged to become “guides on the side” rather than “sages on the stage”; but the role we foresee for L2 English teachers is much more complex and sophisticated than that of a guide on the side of students. In this book, we won’t be asking teachers to give up authority or pretend they know less about English than they do so that they can play the role of a “guide” or, in another cliché, to become “facilitators of learning.” Clearly, teachers are in charge in their classrooms, and they must take charge for any integration of learner-driven strategies to be effective.
However, for authentic digital input to become compelling for students and to engage their full interest and learning, teachers must themselves first become participants in digital youth culture in English, which varies from country to country, and sometimes between genders, sociocultural groups, rural vs. urban areas, and so on. Teachers must take steps, in other words, to see the digital world from their students’ points of view, and to build on what they learn about that world from their students. Second, the learner autonomy that characterizes informal language learning is not automatic and must be acquired. Some students in a class may already be avid learners of English informally; but many others may not, and they may need help in learning to become more autonomous and less dependent on their teacher as the source of English knowledge.
Third, conventional English language teaching tends to focus largely on written and spoken language, with only a few or occasional uses of realia or images. But informal digital learning of English is highly multimodal and requires teachers to become semiotically aware of the quality and uses of video, audio, captioning, and how their artful combination can exponentially raise students’ receptive and productive capabilities. This is especially true when students are invited to compose multimodally, combining images, narration, writing, and music into video presentations—which will also require teachers to become experts not only in English but in the basics of digital production.
Finally, the ubiquity of 24/7 digital resources and learning poses great opportunities for teachers but also some challenges. Ubiquity requires teachers to be constantly aware of what new videos and social media platforms may offer, and what their students may be learning from. “Going digital” also means that teachers need to become aware and responsive to their students’ uses of media and learning management systems 24 hours a day. These will need to be maintained and updated regularly for students to use them from their homes, and teachers may need to get used to students messaging them outside class or working hours and expecting responses. Some boundaries will obviously need to be set, but generally, digital learning will also require teachers to become more adaptive and responsive outside instructional time.
Summing up, the role shift that the integration of informal digital learning with formal classroom instruction requires is from deliverer of knowledge to knowledgeable co-learner. Teachers interested in taking advantage of the gifts of informal digital learning of English in their teaching will need to become much better informed about their students’ online lives, and this will require both entering that world themselves and learning how to talk with their students and learn from them informally as well. In the end, teachers will still be The Boss in their classrooms; but they must become bosses who are empathetic and responsive to the realities of life and learning in the Digital Age.
Plan for the Book
This book is written for English language educators in general and especially English teachers who have an interest in adapting lessons acquired from research on the informal digital learning of English, or IDLE, into their classroom curriculum. It is not a curriculum guide or a “cookbook” with precise directions or “recipes” for teaching, but rather is written as a resource for teachers with scenarios that may be modified to fit the needs of students in specific countries and situations where English is taught as a second or additional language. The book is divided into three main sections:
Part I
:
Introduction: Informal Digital Learning of English and Its Implications.
Introduces and provides background on IDLE, its characteristics, and its complementarity with formal classroom teaching.
Chapter 1: The Age of IDLE and the IDLE Age: Introduction and Plan for the Book.
Introduces IDLE as a research and pedagogical activity, its implications for classroom teaching and for the role of teachers, and the plan for the book.
Chapter 2: Seeing and Hearing the English All Around Us.
This chapter describes who informal digital learners of English (IDLERs) are and provides a more detailed discussion of each of the four characteristics of IDLE discussed in
Chapter 1
.
Chapter 3: Complementarity: Tradition and Innovation in English Learning and Teaching.
Discusses the opportunities and challenges of integrating IDLE with traditional, conventional language instruction.
Part II: IDLE in the Classroom.
