Mobile learning is undergoing rapid evolution. While early generations of mobile learning tended to propose activities that were carefully crafted by educators and technologists, learners are increasingly motivated by their personal learning needs, including those arising from greater mobility and frequent travel. At the same time, it is often argued that mobile devices are particularly suited to supporting social contacts and collaborative learning-claims that have obvious relevance for language learning. A review of publications reporting mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) was undertaken to discover how far mobile devices are being used to support social contact and collaborative learning. In particular, we were interested in speaking and listening practice and in the possibilities for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction in the context of online and distance learning. We reflect on how mobile language learning has developed to date and suggest directions for the future.

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An overview of mobile assisted language learning: From content delivery to supported collaboration and interaction

Web-Based Education for All: A Tool for Development Adaptive Courseware.

Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (2nd ed.) by H. Douglas Brown

In August 2004, Duke University provided free iPods to its entire freshman class (Belanger, 2005). The next month, a Korean education firm offered free downloadable college entrance exam lectures to students who purchased an iRiver personal multimedia player (Kim, 2004). That October, a financial trading firm in Chicago was reportedly assessing the hand-eye coordination of traders’ using GameBoys (Logan, 2004). Yet while such innovative applications abound, the use of technology in education and training is far from new, a fact as true in language classrooms as it is in medical schools.

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Going to the MALL: Mobile Assisted Language Learning

This article describes the evolution of communication technologies, accompanying transformations in everyday communicative activity, and pedagogical possibilities these tools support in second and foreign language (L2) settings. We begin with an overview of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and uses of the Internet to mediate intercultural communication for purposes of L2 learning. We then describe generational shifts in Internet technologies and their proliferation and uses, with the majority of our efforts focused on contemporary environments such as blogs, wikis, podcasting, device-agnostic forms of CMC, and advances in intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL). Throughout, we engage in a discussion of praxeological fusions of various media technologies and the implications of this nexus of practice for the transformation of what it means to teach, learn, and communicate in L2 contexts.

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Evolutionary Trajectories, Internet-Mediated Expression, and Language Education

Computer-assisted language learning is a research field which explores the use of computational methods and techniques as well as new media for language learning and teaching. Recently, an increasi...

A Review of Intelligent CALL Systems

This paper presents ‘Mobile ELDIT’ (m-ELDIT), a system under development which goal is to offer access from PDAs to the learning materials of ELDIT – an adaptable language learning platform. The ELDIT system, which is developed at the European Academy of Bolzano, consists of a learner’s dictionary and a text corpus. Exercises, a tandem system and a tutor module are planned. The system works online and the adaptation of the content is done dynamically according to interactions with the learner. We analyze the requirements for adaptation and transformation of the data, the user interfaces and also the architecture of the ‘Mobile ELDIT’ . We discuss the necessity of specific user modeling in order to provide both online and offline access to the learning materials from mobile devices.

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Mobile ELDIT: Challenges in the Transition from an e-Learning to an m-Learning System

Intelligent Educational Systems (IESs) need large amounts of educational content that is typically not provided by the creators of these systems. In this paper we discuss a new approach for authoring practical IESs where core authoring is done by professional design teams, while the educational content is mainly developed by teachers who use the system in their classes. The major bottleneck of this approach is the lack of intelligent authoring support tools that allow regular teachers to author intelligent content that an IES needs in order to perform its functions. As a contribution to solving this problem, we present our recent work on authoring support for an adaptive vocabulary acquisition system, ELDIT. The paper describes the ELDIT system, the needs and challenges of language content authoring by teachers, and the two authoring support components that we have developed for two essential kinds of language learning content: illustrative examples and educational texts.

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Judith Knapp

Papers

A Review of Intelligent CALL Systems

Mobile ELDIT: Challenges in the Transition from an e-Learning to an m-Learning System

Supporting teachers as content authors in intelligent educational systems

Mobile ELDIT: Transition from an e-Learning to an m-Learning System

Word Formation in an Electronic Learners' Dictionary: ELDIT