Enhancing Interactions with Mobile Devices in Language Classrooms

Sean McMinn

HKUST, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

 

Abstract:

Many educators see the potential of mobile devices to enhance or change teaching and learning. In particular, the affordances of these devices have the potential to change the various interactions that occur within a classroom. The Center for Language Education at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) concluded a Teaching Development Grant project named “Enhancing Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching with Mobile Devices” in early January 2013. The project aimed to develop, implement, and test a TBLT methodology with mobile devices connected to the HKUST network and classroom computer terminals. This presentation will focus on how mobile devices, such as the iPad, can be used in a task-based approach to language learning, enriching the task cycle, creating new opportunities for teaching English (and other languages), extending the classroom, and encouraging new interactions. In many ways, such devices as the iPad allow students to construct and communicate meaning in collaborative and cooperative environments, either face-to-face or through online social media, and it encourages more student-student, student-content, and student-teacher interactions, allowing students to be more motivated and practice using the target language for authentic purposes. Additionally, the combination of mobile devices, appropriate applications, and social media can create opportunities for reflection and metacognition, where students are encouraged in independent learning, self-confidence, and ‘cognitive apprenticeship’, where coaching and modeling occur and where scaffolding is provided to support learning.