The Online Informal Learning of English

G. Sockett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137414885
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Psicolingüística

Young people around the world are increasingly able to access English language media online for leisure purposes and interact with other users of English. This book examines the extent of these phenomena, their effect on language acquisition and their implications for the teaching of English in the 21st century.

1

Introduction

The modern world involves frequent use of the internet for, amongst other things, leisure, work, and purchasing goods and services. Such activities frequently involve the use of English both through interaction with other web users and through exposure to English-language media and this is, to a great extent, true for non-native English speakers just as it is for natives. So it is for many young people around the world that English, which in the past may have been an abstract school subject like geography or history, has become a language that they actually use in leisure and communication.

Such changes in language use are set against a background of formal language learning in which skill levels have traditionally varied. School and university-based learning of English has been characterised by great differences in levels of language skills between countries, depending on a number of factors, which have often been less pedagogical than circumstantial. Indeed, in the past, the availability of English-language media on television or radio, the proximity of English-speaking countries or the influence of former colonial powers have all played a role in helping or hindering learners of English. The central question of this book is whether the relatively recent and frequent use of English on the internet in everyday life can lead to improvements in the level of English-language skills. In order to suggest answers, five subsidiary questions will be discussed in the coming chapters in order to analyse what theoretical basis such internet use may have in language learning research, what online activities are actually taking place, to what extent the language is being learned in this context, what this means for classroom English teaching and what future avenues of research should be undertaken to better understand this complex field. These different fields will be explored through the presentation of a number of research projects, some of which have previously been published and others which were undertaken for the purposes of this book.

1.1    Chapter outlines

After this introductory chapter, which outlines the major issues at stake in what is a relatively new field of study, the second chapter will seek to identify the research object which corresponds to these everyday life contacts with English and their influence on learning. The choice of the term the Online Informal Learning of English (OILE) as the name for this object is by no means immune from criticism. Indeed, applied linguists and other researchers have written extensively about each of the four words which make up this acronym and have not always been unanimous in their conclusions. Nevertheless, it is the intention of Chapter 2 to present this research object in the context of the many existing models of language learning and teaching in order to demonstrate its essential characteristics and to argue that these are best understood within the framework of Complex Dynamic Systems, which is currently a focus of study for many researchers in applied linguistics.

Having characterised OILE from a theoretical perspective, a range of studies will be presented in Chapter 3, in which the activities of users of English in these contexts are documented. These studies relate mostly to French university students majoring in subjects other than English, which is the context with which the author is most familiar, but the findings presented are intended to be representative of activities which may also take place in other contexts and countries. This research is both quantitative and qualitative, and seeks to characterise OILE as both extensive and highly diversified, yet having some system level characteristics which are common to most of its practitioners.

Chapter 4 applies a range of techniques to identify and measure what language skills and knowledge may actually be acquired in the course of these informal activities. Approaches as diverse as corpus studies, diary studies and vocabulary knowledge testing are used to build up a picture of some aspects of this central question and the issues are viewed both from the perspective of the learners themselves and from that of learning theory. Taken together, the results point to a positive answer and suggest that those who report spending considerable time in English language-based leisure activities as simple as watching television series online, are able to identify and use frequently occurring structures from such input material.

Drawing on the findings of the preceding studies, Chapter 5 will seek to determine the theoretical implications of online informal learning for the various fields discussed in Chapter 1. It will be argued that it is time for usage-based approaches to language learning to be recognized as a theoretical perspective well suited to the complexity inherent in language learning today. It will further be suggested that the interconnectedness of formal and informal contexts also means that research into computer assisted language learning needs to take a more contextualised view of the learner and his existing online practices.

In the light of such findings, and in keeping with the traditional focus of French applied linguistics on pedagogical applications, the sixth chapter is devoted to suggesting what impact the preceding findings might have on the language classroom. With this in view, a recent study of teacher attitudes to OILE is analysed to offer an overview of the new challenges it presents and Breen’s (1987) classic study of learner involvement in task design is revisited in the light of contemporary practices to set forward a series of proposals to help teachers to react appropriately to the new perspectives their students are bringing into the classroom.

Before some concluding remarks, Chapter 7 will suggest a road map for other research which could be carried out in this field. While for the purposes of this book, most of the research reported on is by the author and colleagues at Strasbourg University in France, there is a growing interest in this and other related fields, and much is still to be learned about the private world of the learner and the unseen processes by which meaning-focused leisure can, to some extent, lead to changes in attitudes, motivation and communicative skills beyond those presented in the preceding chapters.

After this overview of the contents of this volume, it is perhaps important to continue this general introduction with a focus on the E of OILE and to raise a number of issues about English and the reason why it is the particular object of the present book.

1.2    Why English?

Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) notion of cultural hegemony has been widely taught in universities over the past 40 years. It suggests that the culture around us (one might think of cultural artefacts such as music, advertising, television and film) has an impact on the way we view the world. Therefore, understanding the messages transmitted by this culture is important if we are to understand how people think. Gramsci had in mind political ideologies, or rather a dominant ideology, which might rub off on the general public without the need for explicit indoctrination. While his theories come as no surprise today to students of cultural studies, or other popular liberal arts disciplines of the past 40 years, the impact of such implicit processes in other scientific areas may still be of interest to researchers. So it is that in this book, we seek to consider how implicit processes may be at work in language learning, as the learner is exposed to foreign language materials the formal characteristics of which it is not his¹ explicit aim to understand. Indeed, as will be underlined by many aspects of this book, contact with such English-language media is often motivated by the perceived cultural desirability of the contents rather than by the language learning opportunity they may represent.

With these implicit processes in mind, it is clear that the influence of language and culture can be measured in terms of the impact it has on everyday life. In France, as in many other countries in the world, the most frequently watched television series are American productions such as House or Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and while such programmes have predominated around the world (at least in dubbed form) for almost as long as television has existed, the presence of original English words, whether in titles or through the increasing presence of original version audio, may be seen to be gaining ground, as it is in billboard advertising. Pop music has for many decades been dominated by English-language songs from both sides of the Atlantic, even though the majority of listeners to a global hit have often been unable to understand the lyrics. Films and series which in France were once given French titles such as La Guerre des Etoiles or Le Frelon Vert are now called Star Wars or The Green Hornet. With the expansion of the internet since the mid-1990s has come an increasing exposure to websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, in which English is often used.

So it is that learners of English, and indeed the general public, are increasingly exposed to the language in informal contexts and the issue of the extent to which such exposure leads to or facilitates acquisition of certain aspects of English is the focus of this book.

When studying the learning and teaching of English, many researchers focus on the impact of classroom activities. Indeed, some (such as Reinders and White 2011: 1) see uncontrolled access to target language media as having a negative impact on learners, stating that:

We now better understand that unrestricted access to information, without proper guidance and feedback can in fact inhibit learners from taking more responsibility … and thus developing themselves as autonomous learners.

It may, however, be argued that in many ways, factors outside the classroom exert a positive influence on the language skills of learners already comfortable with managing the flow of material available on the internet. This was historically true of English-listening comprehension activities, including listening to songs in English and viewing original version television output. In the latter case, many studies, such as Bonnet (2002), have shown that the listening comprehension levels of learners of English in countries such as Denmark, Holland and Sweden, where many English-language television programmes are merely subtitled in the local language, were significantly higher than those in countries such as France and Spain where such programmes were generally dubbed. Indeed, Bonnet observed average scores of around 65% for the former countries and 35% for the latter, while the 2012 study of European language skills² found that whereas 75% of lower secondary aged children studying English as a first foreign language in France had a listening comprehension level of A1 or below, the same figure for Sweden was less than 5%.

Young Europeans are no longer dependent on such national broadcasting policies and can themselves choose to download versions of favourite television series in English with or without subtitles from the internet. This can be considered as a significant social change with the potential, as we will see in this book, to break down the linguistic barrier between “dubbing” and “subtitling” countries and offer the prospect of improved communication skills in English for learners from all countries as part of a range of online activities, which we will refer to as OILE.

The range of activities considered here is not limited to television viewing from online sources, but will also encompass many other online activities such as listening to pop music and online reading, as well as social networking and other interactive online practices which may involve the use of English by non-native speakers.

Language development in this context emerges from the intention to communicate and not from an explicit objective of language learning. The process does not follow a set calendar and, as Stevens and Shield (2010) as well as others have observed, the language user may not be aware that these activities are contributing to progress in the foreign language. Hence, this development is very much a by-product of these activities and the incidental nature of the learning resulting from them will be discussed in this book in the context of some of the existing literature in the areas of incidental language acquisition, learner autonomy and out of class learning (OCL).

For all the reasons developed above, the particular focus of this book is on English, a specificity which must be seen in the wider context of the field of language learning and teaching. In France, the context with which the author is most familiar, as in other European countries, many researchers seek to underline the importance of linguistic diversity through the study and promotion of plurilingual skills. Hence, diversity in individual language repertoires, and the preservation and promotion of less used languages are key constructs. While this perspective is valuable and even indispensable in the greater scheme of European development and cooperation, specialists in the didactics of English should be careful that this quest for linguistic pluralism does not mask the unique position occupied by the English language in Europe and the effects this position may have on learning.

Swift and profound changes are taking place in the way English-language media, most particularly online media, are used by young people. Today’s computers are quickly being replaced by tablets and larger smartphones, which are increasingly designed to put leisure activities first. Internet access on handheld devices has rapidly moved from being the preserve of the top end of the mobile telephony market to being an everyday experience for students and others. It is therefore important to continue to measure and analyse these changes in order to get a better grasp of the learner’s unique linguistic universe so as to organise the formal teaching of English and build on the contacts with the language, which are an everyday reality for many.

With this in view, this volume is presented as a snapshot of the state of these practices over the period 2009–2013 and it is hoped that it will offer a starting point for further research as the complex and dynamic private world of young language users continues to evolve in the years to come.

2

Informal Learning and Languages

The Online Informal Learning of English is best understood as a complex range of internet-based activities. Since the term “complex” will be used frequently in the coming chapters, it is perhaps useful to remind ourselves that it means interconnected, as in a complex of buildings, rather than just complicated or difficult. As such it is often used along with the word “system”, to underline the fact that many different factors, in this case factors in language learning, are interconnected and so influence one another as learning takes place.

The people carrying out these online activities are not primarily seeking to learn English through them, although language development may be taking place. Since many different activities are involved, it would be tempting to begin this book with a review of these practices, drawing on different studies of learners carried out by the author over the past four years. However, in the very complexity of such activities, and the contradictory nature of their intentions (leisure) and outcomes (learning), it is all the more important to begin by situating the field of study within the various paradigms which already exist in applied linguistics and beyond. An extensive descriptive and analytical review of the activities involved will follow in Chapter 3 and will be more comprehensible to the reader by virtue of the epistemological contextualisation offered here.

In this chapter, OILE will be situated in the context of a number of existing paradigms, namely informal learning, computer assisted language learning, learner autonomy, complex dynamic systems, input hypothesis and intertextuality. This eclectic range of theoretical positions reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the research presented in this book and is necessary to encompass the sociocultural, cognitive, didactic and linguistic factors which interact together in such informal learning.

2.1 What is informal learning?

Use of the term “informal learning” to describe the way in which exposure to English outside the classroom may lead to acquisition of the language, has a number of limits, which should be presented at the outset, since other terms may present advantages over it or may at least be considered equally valid.

“Informal” relates to settings in which the exposure takes place and should not be confused with the language register of the same name, although the extent to which informal learning leads to the acquisition of the informal register shall be discussed later. Since the work in this book moves from understanding what learners are doing in their free time to understanding how this impacts acquisition, the term “incidental acquisition” may also have been used since it focuses on the non-deliberate aspect of the phenomenon, although reducing emphasis on the context in which the acquisition takes place, as Ellis (1994) and others have pointed out, incidental acquisition is central to most types of language learning, including learning in formal contexts.

The learning/acquisition debate is one which is familiar to students of language learning and teaching and it will become apparent in the research presented here that there are few, if any, organised learning activities at work in OILE. The term is, therefore, to be understood in a more general sense as leading to knowledge of the language, rather than as in opposition to acquisition.

Finally, it is always expedient to have a functional acronym rather than a list of vowels to focus attention on an area of research, as Cole¹ has suggested in his use of FASIL (Fully Autonomous Self Instructed Learning) to describe the same process in Brazil.

The idea that learning may take place outside the classroom is certainly not a new one. Jay Cross (2006) argues that learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work and in the groups that matter to you, and that informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs. (2006: 19)

This general definition provides a framework for informal learning which associates it with socio-constructi...