In the section of literature review, previous research on podcast for language learning together with mobile assisted learning on vocabulary and grammar will be reviewed.
Podcasts for Language Teaching and Learning
Through previous literature of using podcasts for educational purposes, the potential of podcasts have been widely recognized for it could serve as a great source of authentic input, a tool for producing and sharing output to promote interactions in learning process, and a sort of alternative and multimedia material that can increase learning motivation (Lomicka& Lord, 2011).
Podcasting
Developing own Using existing resources podcast materials
Teacher- Student- Authentic Language courses developed developed materials
Podcasting as Podcasting as the core of supplement
instruction to courses
Figure 1:Taxonomy of the uses of podcasting in language learning (reproduced from Fernando, 2007)
In Fernado’s (2007) taxonomy (See Figure 1), the use of podcasts in language learning is clearly summarized and presented. One can find that usually the instructors who use podcasts either choose to create tailor-made podcasts for certain course activities or make use of existing resources as authentic input. On the other hand, the implementation of podcasts can be designed as the core of instruction or the supplement to class based on teachers’ teaching goals and learners’ needs.
The Potentials of Podcasts in Language Learning
Many language-specific articles have provided ideas for how to use podcasts in the classroom. While authentic listening materials are viewed as essential for promoting listening comprehension, the great abundance of podcast recorded in English undoubtedly is one of the best source pools for improving one’s listening.
McBride (2009), Schmidt (2008), and Stanley (2006) all proposed that teachers could combine podcast listening with other tasks like answering comprehension questions or keeping a listening journal to enhance students’ listening ability. Other researchers have suggested ways in which podcast can be used to promote oral production.
McQuillian (2006) proposed that students could keep an audio dairy or conduct interviews with native speakers to practice speaking. Sze (2006) suggested that through the process of recording podcasts, listening to one’s and other’s podcasts, and re-recording podcasts, students can practice pronunciation and intonation. Fox (2008) provided the idea of setting a platform for talk radio podcast, on which students can listen to, create, publish, and comment on student-made podcasts and thus an interactive and meaningful learning process could be realized.
Benefits of Using Podcasts for Language Learning Research on Using Podcasts for General Language Learning
When it is clear that podcasting has made its way to language learning, its quantifiable benefits might remain in question if there is no support of empirical studies. Therefore, several experiments utilizing podcast for language learning were reviewed to present the impact of podcasts on language learning. Abdous et al. (2009) discussed using podcasts for various purposes such as guest lectures, paired interviews, and providing feedback on students’ work. The results of the survey on 113 participants revealed an increase in students’ use of podcast as well as language skill acquisition. Ducate and Lomicka (2009) investigated four podcasting projects implemented in university-level language learning or teacher training. Their finding suggested that the majority of the participants enjoyed the podcast assignments and felt benefited from them. However, the results also pointed out that many of the participants chose the platform based on convenience rather than mobility and thus listened to podcasts on personal computer instead of MP3-capable mobile devices.
Thus Ducate and Lomicka suggested that educators should carefully consider how podcast can relate to mobility in the learning process.
Another study conducted by O’bryan and Hegelheimer (2007) demonstrated how podcasting can be integrated into the syllabus of a strategy-based listening course.
Podcasts were used to summarize the concepts covered in class, model the application of strategies, provide opportunities for practices, and introduce materials that would be referenced in the following period. According to the instructor’s report, one of the biggest benefits of integrating podcasting tasks is that she can extend class time and provide more input to practice students’ listening skills out of classroom. Also, the authentic podcasts help expose students to different types of spoken English. From students’ perspective, podcasts receive positive feedback for being informative and
easy to use. In addition to the potential of the educational impact of podcasting, O’Bryant and Hegelheimer also suggested that, given the increasing mobility of podcasting, further research could look at how using mobile devices outside of a lab setting can affect the integration of podcasting into formal learning.
Research on Using Podcasts for Specific Language Leaning Domains While literature showing learners’ interests in podcasting projects has gradually increased, the number of studies reporting on gains made by the use of podcast to specific language domains is rather scant.
In Lord’s (2008) study, 19 students in an undergraduate Spanish phonetic class worked in small groups to create and maintain podcast channels on which recordings of tongue twisters and short readings were uploaded for group members’ feedback.
Both attitudes toward pronunciation and pronunciation skills were assessed in the beginning and the end of the semester, and both were found to improve.
Another empirical research involving podcasting and pronunciation was reported by Ducate and Lomicka (2009). The participants of the study consisted of 12 learners of German and 10 learners of French who were enrolled in intermediate level class. After receiving a technical training on how to create and upload podcasts to their blogs, students were asked to record a total of 8 podcasts over the course, including 5 scripted pronunciation podcasts (pretest, scripted 1, 2, 3, and posttest) as well as other 3 extemporaneous podcasts. All of the podcasts were contextualized around the theme of study abroad and lasted for 2 to 3 minutes. Throughout the semester, a native speaker assistant listened to the scripted pronunciation podcasts to provide written assessment with detailed feedback. As for the extemporaneous podcasts, students were required to listen to classmates’ works and comment on the content, while the instructor evaluated the recording files in terms of content,
coherency and organization, pronunciation and fluency, accuracy, creativity, and impact on the listeners. According to the statistic analysis, there were no significant differences from the pretest to the posttest over time or between scripted and extemporaneous tasks. In respond to whether students’ attitudes toward pronunciation changed during the process, statistics again revealed no significant differences. The results of the study suggested that repeated podcasts recording were not enough to improve pronunciation over a semester, and more focused and consistent practices as well as computer assisted visual feedback were recommended to supplement the podcasting tasks.
When the previous literature was reviewed, most of the studies were found to focus on surveying students’ attitudes toward podcast-related activities or on investigating the impact of podcasts on listening or speaking ability. Few articles that addressed the effectiveness of podcasts on other specific areas of language learning like vocabulary or grammar could be found.
Mobile Assisted Language Learning
While the collection of documents on podcast-related language learning is rather limited, the number of research that involves mobile learning and language learning is increasing. In the following part, the researcher collected and summarized some MALL studies, especially those focusing on vocabulary and grammar learning.
Research on Mobile Assisted Activities for Formal Learning
In the field of mobile assisted language learning, one of the influential directions is the implementation of mobile devices to engage students more actively in classroom learning or to extend and supplement formal learning with the help of mobile assisted activities. One example of applying mobile learning in the classroom
is demonstrated by Wang and Looi (2010). In their first experiment, a class of 40 primary students received an English lesson on the topic of six prepositions for two hours and were expected to use those prepositions in sentence appropriately. After the instruction, students were asked to take photos on campus with their mobile phones to illustrate the six prepositions and then make sentences to describe the photos they take.
Through combining physical actions and cognitive activities, the researcher attempted to provide opportunities for learners to engage in a meaning-making process from their own experiences and thus enhance learning.
In their second experiment, another group of 40 students were taught several Chinese idioms with lectures and animations depicting the meaning on smartphones in class. Similar to the first experiment, students were then required to create contexts that could describe idioms they had learned, to take pictures of that context with smartphones, and to share sentences containing the idioms with the whole class. A webpage was also used for students to post their photos with sentences and comment on each other’s work after class. Within the nine-week period, the 40 students contributed 481 photo/sentence sets, revised their sentences for 124 times, and posted 134 comments. However, most of the contributions were found to come from a certain group of individuals while 70 percent of the students offered less than one photo/sentence set per week in average, showing a great individual difference in participation. Though pointing out some of the challenges like decreased participation in after-school m-learning activities and parents’ fear of losing or damaging the handheld devices that defeats the purpose of seamless learning, the researchers concluded the study with the potential of m-learning for increasing motivation for in-class or formal learning and for promoting creative output that could facilitate knowledge acquisition. However, though Wang and Looi’s study presented the products of students in using smartphones for learning in class, they did not really tell
us the impact of the tool together with the activities on students’ learning gains or motivation.
Another example of how courses can be supplemented and how students can extend their learning outside of the classroom with the help of mobile devices is presented by Stockwell (2010). To investigate how learners used mobile phone for vocabulary learning when they had an alternative platform, Stockwell conducted a study over a three-year period with a total of 175 college students in the English class focusing on improving listening skills and vocabulary. All of the participants had no experiences in using mobile phones for language learning before taking the subject.
Held once a week for 15 weeks, the class was designed to mainly performing listening activities. Vocabulary activities based on the textbook materials were developed and made available for any PC or mobile phones with Internet capabilities for students to use after class. After demonstrating how to complete all the vocabulary exercises on both PC and mobile phone platforms, learners were told to have the freedom of choosing either platform or even switching between platforms at will to finish all the activities. The vocabulary activity system designed in this experiment presented rather passive exercises like choosing the correct word for a definition from a list of alternatives to more productive exercises that required learners to type in an appropriate word for a sentence. The intelligent engine in the system would assign competency score depending on learner responses and consider an item as “known” if the learner reached a competency score of 8 for that item.
By familiarizing students with the vocabulary of each lesson, the vocabulary activities assisted students in performing in-class listening activities and listening cloze quiz. As to learners’ habits of using the two platforms, results showed that 59%, 78%, and 42% of the students in the year 2007, 2008, and 2009 respectively completed no task at all on mobile phones; another 24%, 8%, and 22% of students in
each year completed less than one fifth of the activities on mobile. The statistics indicated that students seemed to be more comfortable with learning on their personal computers. Furthermore, while the server logs of the system showed students reached similar scores on PC and on mobile, the researcher also found it took much longer to complete the exercise on mobile platform, probably because of the time spent on scrolling up and down through the small screen to see all the items. Though vocabulary learning is the main task for participants in this study, it is the choice of platform not the vocabulary gains that was attended to by Stockwell; therefore the effect of mobile activities on vocabulary learning was not measured or reported.
However, the study of Stockwell still shed light on the present study by revealing the low yet increasing numbers of mobile phone use on learning over time, which indicated that perception is changing, and by suggesting integrating learning activities with other mobile uses in order to promote learners’ willingness to try mobile learning. Furthermore, his study design reminded researchers to think about the order of learning activities and learning tools. As Decoo (2001) warned that “quite often the media made the methods,” meaning that educator sometimes allow technology to dominate choices about approaches to language teaching, when instead one should first consider what kinds of activities promote language learning and then use whatever tools best support the activities (cited from McBride, 2009)
Research on Language Learning Combined with Mobile Phone Use
As Stockwell suggested that combining learning materials or activities with daily mobile use may increase students’ motivation in mobile language learning, an example of mobile informal learning assisting formal learning after class is presented by Levy and Kennedy (2005), in which SMS was used as a supplement to formal course and helped students with their Italian vocabulary learning.
In their study, 18 students of Italian with high intermediate level who enrolled in the course of “Italian Literature and Society” participated in the experiment for a seven-week period. In that course, students were required to read short novels while the large amount of new vocabulary was reported to be the greatest challenge for students. Thus, throughout the course, short messages limited to 160 characters with new words, definitions, and example sentences were sent to students’ mobile phones to help. All of the materials sent were closely bound up with the language of the novels students were reading and the learning objectives of that course. Other than vocabulary learning materials, messages on related news, literature, and administration were also prepared. According to students’ self-report, the vast majority of the students (17/18) enjoyed receiving the messages, and most of them preferred to receive messages at 9 or 10 a.m. in the morning. In terms of the content and the number of messages received, almost 90 percent of the students suggested that two to three messages per day is appropriate and content related to grammar or vocabulary was most favored. Though the researchers did not evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, from students’ reports, the educational impact of the short messages could be seen. Some of the students wrote down the vocabulary in their wordbook, looked them up in the dictionary and grammar books, and carefully considered the translations after receiving the messages. As Levy and Kennedy concluded in their article, a message may trigger the receiver to actively engage in language learning between classes. Though the SMS message itself may be short, the educational impact may reach far beyond the initial message, especially with the more motivated students.
Research on Mobile Assisted Activities for Informal Learning
While using mobile assisted activities as the core of classroom learning or a
supplement to formal learning has been flourished in MALL literature, research on informal learning or on mobile phone’s potential in promoting learning autonomy is rather scant.
Thornton and Houser (2005) had provided an instance of integrating learning to other mobile uses in daily life. To explore the ownership of mobile phones among college students and the potential of mobile devices in enhancing vocabulary learning, surveys and experiments were conducted. According to the result of their poll, all of the 333 female college students in the study owned mobile phones with Internet capability, and email messaging was showed to be the most utilized feature. When asked about the desirability of several educational functions they would like to have with the mobile phones, receiving notifications about the class turned out to be the most desired function, followed by receiving and submitting assignments, and receiving notifications of quiz and grades. On the contrary, in-class tasks like taking notes, answering questions, and consulting with classmates were regarded as less important features.
With a basic understanding of students’ habits in mobile use, an experiment was designed to send mini-lessons to students via email messages three times a day with the attempts to investigate how mobile lessons can enhance vocabulary learning.
Each day, a mini-lesson containing no more than 100 words with target vocabulary was sent to a group of students’ mobile phones at 9:00, 12:30, and 17:00 respectively, with the first lesson introducing the meaning of a new word in sentence context, the second lesson rehearsing previously introduced items in a short passage, and the third lesson reviewing the target words in a serialized story. At the same time, a website was prepared for another group of students to read the identical materials on the identical schedule. After two weeks, the two groups of students switched the media for another 2 weeks to make the experiment counterbalanced. From the comparison of
the pretest and posttest scores, the mobile group was found to learn significantly more words than the web group. In the second experiment, a similar design was applied while the materials available on website were changed to be delivered through paper, and the mobile group still performed significantly better than the paper group. The results of their experiments suggested that mobile devices could be an effective learning tool when suitable materials were available and when students can make use of their time to learn.
Research on Mobile Ownership and Students’ Perspectives
Other than how the tool is utilized and how learning activities are designed, the ownership of mobile devices and learners’ using habits also play an essential role in the process of promoting mobile learning. To evaluate the potential of mobile learning, some MALL research has made attempts to investigate students’ habits of using mobile devices and their perspectives on mobile learning.
In Beres’s study (2011), the results of a comparison between the beginning- and end-of-semester surveys on 38 students revealed their perspectives on m-learning. In the initial survey, 93% of the students reported having some type of MP3-capable device, such as iPod, iPhone, and smartphones. In addition, 83% indicated that they used their MP3 every day or several times a week, and 61% of the students “always”
or “on most days” carried the devices with them. Among them, 39% of the students claimed they had tried using their MP3 players to support language learning. The most commonly used resources for mobile assisted language learning was listening to music in the target language (95%), followed by watching videos or listening to
or “on most days” carried the devices with them. Among them, 39% of the students claimed they had tried using their MP3 players to support language learning. The most commonly used resources for mobile assisted language learning was listening to music in the target language (95%), followed by watching videos or listening to