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As a practitioner working with study-abroad students in Canada,
I often wish I knew more about what my students were up to when I’m not
around. I ask myself questions like: Do they have enough opportunities
to use English in meaningful ways? Are they encountering and negotiating
cultural difference? Are they being supported by their peer community?
Like many instructors working with young adults far from their homes
(often for the first time), I feel responsible for ensuring they benefit
from the cultural and linguistic opportunities surrounding them. A few
years ago, my concerns spurred me to undertake a small research project
on out-of-class interactions with 12 undergraduate study-abroad English
learners in Montreal. I thought if I could get study-abroad learners to
report details about their experiences outside the classroom, I would
have more insight into critical intercultural incidents that I could
then discuss in my classroom. But how could I make sure my participants
would actually take down details about their interactions? Notebooks?
Diaries?
I decided to take a risk. Instead of using diaries or
interviews as other researchers had traditionally done (Jackson, 2008), I
asked students to use their own mobile devices to report their language
use. Their task: to complete a 3-minute mobile survey each time they
spoke English for a period of 10 days. After training them briefly to
use the electronic survey, I set them loose in the world and crossed my
fingers that I would get some usable data. What I ended up with was
astounding.
My 12 participants submitted more than 800
surveys. What’s more, they didn’t just include public
interactions like ordering pizza; they reported interactions I never
thought to ask about. Every student reported moments when they failed to
communicate or felt powerless. One participant described how a girl
turned him down for a date. Another student described how she argued
with her roommate about who ate the last of the yoghurt. After the
project was finished, the students told me that via their participation,
they had become more aware of features of their own English use. For
example, one student noticed she only spoke to nonnative speakers.
Another noted she spoke about the same number of limited topics, over
and over. I started to think that perhaps this project could be used for
more than just finding out what my students talked about. This kind of
data could be easily used to fuel critical discussions about who is
responsible for miscommunications or why some interactions are more
difficult than others. It is in that spirit that I share my procedure
and rationale, in the hopes that the creative readers of this forum will
transform my project into a language awareness activity for their
students.
Why Use Mobile Devices Instead of Paper Diaries or Logs?
The ubiquity of mobile devices in daily life makes them ideal
research tools. Mobile devices are essentially invisible; they are
already a part of many young people’s everyday lives and can be
integrated seamlessly and inconspicuously into their daily practices
(Bachmair & Pachler, 2015). Consider the sheer number of social
network updates and SMS conversations that today’s youth engage in.
Students use mobile devices to record and share all aspects of their
lives with others, especially their noninstitutional activities (think
Instagrammed dinners). Because I was interested in learning about
informal everyday situations, asking students to use devices on which
they already recorded such details seemed ideal for this project. My
hope was that they could complete entries on the bus, in their houses,
and at parties without drawing undue attention. What I did not expect,
however, is that the use of personal devices seemed also to encourage
the sharing of more intimate or vulnerable moments when they felt
powerless as additional language speakers.
My Mobile Survey
For this project, I used a mobile survey platform called Survey Gizmo to create a
short questionnaire that would be accessible from all devices and
platforms, including Smartphones, tablets, and desktops (other mobile
survey tools would likely also work well). My original intent was to
obtain information on the social functions of the language students were
using (e.g., how often they apologized or complained and which was more
difficult). Therefore, my survey aimed to record the contexts,
frequency, and relative difficulty of different interactions in
study-abroad students’ daily life. I included the following
questions:
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What happened? What did you say? (open-ended)
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Location (open-ended)
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Who were your conversation partners? (open-ended)
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How well do you know your conversation partners? (1–5 scale)
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Were any of your partners native speakers of English? (yes/no/I don’t know)
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How easy was it for you to speak English in this situation? (1–5 scale)
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In one week, how often do you use English to say something similar?(1–5 scale)
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Comments (open-ended)
These questions could be adapted to focus more narrowly on
interactions in specific contexts (e.g., service encounters) or a
particular kind of language (e.g., swearing).
Procedure
Once I had created the survey,I recruited 12 undergraduate
study-abroad students who were studying abroad at an English-speaking
university in Montreal. They were from various first language
backgrounds and had come on a one or two semester–long exchange. I then
invited them to a group training session. Each person practiced using
the survey and completed a trial entry. We also discussed the kinds of
information that were good to include. For example, we watched video
clips of friends interacting and practicedbeing specific about the kinds
of language that was being used (e.g., instead of I talked
about music use I explained what music I liked or I told her I didn’t like that music).
Sufficient training was critical for gathering detailed information
about their interactions. It also meant I didn’t have to include lengthy
instructions in the mobile survey, which made it faster (and more
attractive) to complete.
For 10 days following the training, the participants submitted
surveys using whatever mobile device they desired. Some students
preferred tablets and some smartphones, but they all tended to submit
entries in small batches several times a day. The surveys took from 1–6
minutes to complete. Each time a survey was completed, the data were
sent to a master account where I could monitor the times and number of
entries submitted. The data were also automatically entered on a
spreadsheet for easy analysis.
A week following collection, we met again as a group to discuss
which kinds of topics or acts, such as apologizing or complaining, were
easiest and which were most difficult. We critically reflected on why
some might be more difficult than others, which led to discussions of
cultural difference. Once I had all the data, I grouped survey entries
by difficulty rating to see if there were patterns in the features of
interactions which were rated difficult. I also grouped the interactions
by location (e.g., residence or public) and by interlocutor type (e.g.,
peer or professor) to investigate how their English use was
distributed. In this way, I was able to map out my students’ language
use and understand the factors that made interactions challenging for
them.
Creating a Language-Awareness Project Using Mobile Surveys
What stood out in this project is that by completing entries,
students became more aware of patterns in their English use and were
able to think critically about cultural differences. The practice of
systematically recording details about interactions afforded them some
distance and allowed for an analytical space that instructors could
harness to explore critical language issues.
I believe that by asking students to analyse their own data
(instead of the researcher), the power of this activity could be further
enhanced. Here are a few ways this mobile-survey project could be
modified as a course project to promote students’ awareness about their
own and others’ language practices:
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Students could choose entries in which miscommunication
occurred, discuss why there was a breakdown, and rewrite the
interaction.
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Based on the data they collected, students could reflect
critically on the different kinds of English used for different
activities and with different people.
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Students could choose an interaction rated as easy and one
rated as difficult and discuss what aspects of the context made them
rate it that way.
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Students could be asked to produce maps of their interactions.
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The survey could be modified to investigate a particular type
of encounter or language, such as insults. Students could gather their
observations in small groups and present on their experiences.
Conclusion
In many contexts, the quantity and quality of students’ English
experiences outside the classroom are often the lens through which they
perceive success or failure in language learning (Benson, Barkhuisen,
Bodycott, & Brown, 2013). Bringing a critical discussion of
those experiences into the classroom via data collected with mobile
surveys could be one way to encourage them to consider the complex
language issues they face in their daily lives.
References
Bachmair, B., & Pachler, N. (2015). Framing ubitquitous
mobility educationally: Mobile devices and context-aware learning. In
L.-H. Wong, M. Milrad, & M. Specht (Eds.), Seamless
learning in the age of mobile connectivity (pp. 57–74). New
York, NY: Springer.
Benson, P., Barkhuisen, G., Bodycott, P., & Brown, J.
(2013). Second language identity in narratives of study
abroad. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jackson, J. (2008). Language, identity, and study
abroad: Sociocultural perspectives. London, England:
Equinox.
Victoria Surtees is a PhD candidate and instructor
in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University
of British Columbia. She works primarily with undergraduate study-abroad
students and teacher candidates specializing in TESL. The project
described in this article was part of her master’s research and was
presented in 2014 at the Conference of the American Applied Linguistics
Association in Toronto (presentation available here).
In her PhD research, she continues to use mobile devices in innovative
ways to explore students’ out-of-class experiences. |