Kaliampos EFL Learners' Task Perceptions and Agency in Blended Learning

An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study on the 'U.S. Embassy School Election Project'
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0384-8
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 488 Seiten

Reihe: Giessener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik

How does foreign language learners' agency emerge at the micro-level of classroom activity during the enactment of digitally-enhanced tasks, and how do these learners exercise their agency digitally within and beyond the classroom? Drawing on research in task-based and computer-assisted language learning, this mixed-methods study uncovers key dimensions of 'learner agency' - a newcomer to the field of language teaching methodology and applied linguistics. The analysis centers on three case studies of teenage students' perceptions and handling of digitally-enhanced language learning tasks. These are complemented with a Germany-wide questionnaire survey among participants in the U.S. Embassy School Election Project - an intercultural, blended language learning project that has drawn over 15,000 participants since 2012.

Joannis Kaliampos forscht im Bereich der transkulturellen und digital-gestützten Englischdidaktik und ist Mitbegründer und Senior Advisor beim internationalen Blended Learning-Projekt Teach About US. Als Lehrer für Geschichte und Englisch unterrichtet er an der IGS Winsen und leitet Fortbildungen zu interkulturellen und digitalen Aspekten des Englischunterrichts.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kaliampos, Joannis

Leseproben

1 Introduction
Digital technology increasingly penetrates and transforms virtually all aspects of life. Young people today are increasingly socialized into a dizzying array of digitally mediated practices ranging from leisure and entertainment to learning and professional purposes. The annual JIM survey (Jugend, Information, Medien [Youth, Information, Media], MPFS, 2019) of German teenagers’ digital practices paints the image of an ever more connected and digitally adept generation, always online, with nearly universal access to digital devices. They habitually communicate and engage with friends, family, and wider peer communities by using multimodal tools, streaming foreign language music, films, and TV series for entertainment, reading the news on web-based media outlets, shopping online, and engaging in online gaming, amongst other practices—for a daily average of 205 minutes. At the same time, this generation, more than in previous years, employs their informally gained digital literacies, social relationships, and foreign language skills to advance causes they are passionate about, such as matters of social and environmental justice. A sociological study on the life-world of young people aged 12 to 25 in Germany, entitled ‘A generation speaks up,’ recently concluded, “[a]s part of their personal search for a secure and autonomous place in society, they [i.e., young people] adapt to prevailing circumstances so that they can seize opportunities that open up to the best degree possible” (Hurrelmann et al., 2019, p. 13). With this, the authors capture critical tenets of what is subsequently investigated as learner agency: the desire for self-actualization, the skillful realization and exploitation of affordances in a given environment towards personally meaningful objectives, individual action and responsibility vis-à-vis the social environment, and reflective awareness of one’s actions. These developments fundamentally impact what it takes to learn a foreign language and to be proficient in it. Today, language learning is not confined to the physical classroom but occurs intentionally or in passing, informally, in practices as diverse as streaming a video, engaging in civic action, or playing online games. Being proficient in a language, similarly, involves using multimodal semiotic resources, such as GIFs, emojis, non-linear texts, hashtags, and more, besides merely understanding and producing spoken and written language. There is no doubt, current English as a foreign language (EFL) practices in schools poorly reflect this extramural reality of adolescent foreign language learners. What is more, when EFL classroom practice does incorporate the use of digital technology, too little is known about how learners handle digital tools and exploit their affordances to attain learning objectives. The motivation for this study on learners’ task perceptions and agency in blended learning (BL) projects stems from the desire to understand how participants implement such projects and the accompanying use of digital tools and learning management systems (LMS) in the context of their EFL classrooms. The study shows how learners’ task perceptions are highly individualistic and influenced by a complex configuration of variables, ranging from contextual features to those of the learning community and the learners themselves, to the task’s design and implementation. Crucially, learner agency in technology-mediated tasks emerges from the subsequent analysis as being technologically, socially, and psychologically mediated, next to other potential means of mediation, such as cultural and linguistic. This exploratory research focus thus responds to several interconnected desiderata in foreign language pedagogy and research: In the same way that task-based research has suffered from a dearth of non-laboratory, process-oriented research examining the learners’ concrete perceptions and handling of tasks under the contingencies of the intact classroom (Samuda et al., 2018), research on the use of digital technology has yet to address the implementation of BL approaches in EFL classrooms adequately (Healey, 2016; B. Smith & González-Lloret, 2020). Curriculum writers, materials designers, and teachers may falsely assume a position of ‘availability = use’ of digital tools in tasks. However, theoretical perspectives rooted in affordance theory (Blin, 2016a, 2016b; Kirschner et al., 2004; Liu & Chao, 2018; Norman, 1988) and sociocultural theory (Breen, 1987; Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Legutke & Thomas, 1991), as well as empirical research based on user tracking (Chun, 2013; Fischer, 2012) and classroom-based methods (Nunan & Bailey, 2009) strongly suggest that learners’ use of technology in EFL is idiosyncratic and creative, yet frequently unsystematic. The goal of foreign language education is commonly conceptualized as discourse competence (Hallet, 2008), which entails sociocultural participation in personally relevant discourses for advancing one’s own objectives, from a local to an increasingly international and global scale (Lütge, 2015), using English as a lingua franca. Digital platforms of the social and semantic Web, as well as LMS, extend and qualitatively transform the opportunities for meaningful foreign language discourse participation and learner agency (Redecker, 2009; Reinhardt, 2018; Vandergriff, 2016). In a world ever more connected through digital practices for communication, collaboration, and self-expression in professional, entertainment, and play contexts, learners’ access to as well as their participation and proficiency in these technology-mediated discursive genres represent opportunities for personal development and well-being (Hargittai, 2002; van Dijk & van Deursen, 2014). To exploit such opportunities, EFL learners need agency, meaning they must be willing and able to regulate their behavior but also, in cooperation with their peers, seek and create learning opportunities spanning formal and increasingly informal learning contexts by employing foreign language and digital literacy skills in multimodal, multiuser, and multilingual contexts (Dudeney et al., 2014). This study focuses on a school project which set out to achieve these goals in the context of the U.S. presidential election and, at the time of writing this study, continues to attract several thousand participants in Germany and other countries. The U.S. Embassy School Election Project—the context of this study—was designed as an innovative learning scenario by a partnership of public (U.S. Embassy Berlin, Leuphana University) and non-profit (LIFE e. V.) partners and curricular agencies (LISUM Berlin-Brandenburg) to connect the methodological principles of computer-assisted and task-based language learning as well as inter- and transcultural learning in a nationwide project context (Kaliampos & Schmidt, 2014; Kohl & Schmidt, 2014). With the increasing relevance of participatory Web-tools and social media in the field of political discourse and news reporting—examples of discourses which many of the targeted students already followed in their foreign language, English—the U.S. election was considered to provide an enormous linguistic, discursive, motivational, and intercultural learning potential and an authentic context for modeling and experimenting with digitally-mediated English-language discourses. Following the methodological rationale of task-based language teaching (TBLT), the project’s target task asked learners to adopt the perspective of the U.S. voters, predict one assigned state’s vote, and present it in the format of a digital artifact as part of a school competition—“this was no easy task” as the organizers concluded (Kohl & Schmidt, 2014, n.p.). More specifically, this study is interested in the implementation of this large-scale project in the local context of the EFL classroom under the conditions of the participants’ daily school practice. To this end, it seeks to illuminate learners’ perception of and engagement in technology-mediated tasks and the moment-by-moment emergence of digital practices and EFL learning within this context. The focus, thus, is on the ‘how’ of task enactment in the socioculturally bounded classroom context. By adopting an exploratory orientation, the study asks how learners engage in blended learning EFL tasks, exploit their affordances and, crucially, how learners develop and exercise their agency during the enactment of technology-mediated tasks. To tackle these questions from complementary perspectives, the investigation relies on a mixed-methods rationale. A nationwide quantitative participant survey offers a macro-perspective on the project and generates research foci for the subsequent qualitative classroom-based research in three focal 11th-grade EFL courses. Despite the purported affordances of the tools associated with Web 2.0 for foreign language learning (T. Schmidt, 2009, 2011; T. Schmidt & Strasser, 2018), projects like these still cannot be considered standard practice in German EFL classrooms. The reasons are varied, ranging from issues of access and availability of devices to curricular frameworks, as well as teacher beliefs and teacher training. Indeed, the implementation of technology-enhanced language learning seems far from being ‘normalized’ (Bax, 2003) as the state of emergency remote teaching and learning (Gacs et al., 2020) revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures across Germany in the spring and summer of 2020 (Huber et al., 2020; Initiative D21 & Technical University of Munich, 2020). Therefore, this study aims to elicit insights into the implementation of EFL projects and the participation in authentic discourses with digital...