Blogs and wikis

It may seem unusual to include blogs and wikis in a section on social networking, but if we consider the nature of each of these tools, we can see that they are, in many ways, forerunners to the social networking sites that are in extensive use today. Weblogs, or blogs as they are more commonly known, are popular cyber arenas for self-expression. In essence, a blog is a personal online journal which can be set up and maintained with little technical expertise, and which can include pictures and videos along with textual entries. Blogs also make it possible for other people to post comments regarding what has been written by the owner of the blog or people who posted comments earlier. In this sense, blogs have typically been used by family, friends, and people who share similar ideas or hobbies to interact with one another, thus creating a kind of de facto network. It is interesting to note that most of the major networking sites in use today still incorporate blogs within their functionality; however, it is possible to control who is able to see the content and who can comment on it. In language learning environments, one of the most commonly cited benefits of blogs is that they provide an authentic audience to learners when they write in the target language, where their writing can be read by a wider audience rather than just the teacher for assessment purposes. There have been a number of studies carried out on blogs, incorporating tasks that enable learners to study and write about the target culture where feedback is provided by peers (Dippold, Reference Dippold2009) or by native speakers of the target culture (Lee, Reference Lee2009). Reactions from learners regarding publicizing their blogs have been varied, with some learners opting to keep their blogs private between themselves and the teacher (Murray and Hourigan, Reference Murray and Hourigan2008), and others welcoming feedback from the wider community, even when it was less than positive (e.g. Pinkman, Reference Pinkman2005).

Wikis are very different in nature from blogs, in that they are used predominantly for collaboratively composing online documents rather than as a journal. One key point of a wiki is that, externally, at the very least, it is difficult to know who contributed to what part of a document as any person who has editing rights can add to, delete, or alter any information which is contained within it. Records are kept of changes and it is generally possible to “roll back” to a previous version should editing be carried out that is not appropriate or desired. Perhaps the best known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the online wiki-based encyclopedia. Information is provided by people all around the world in an essentially anonymous manner (although it is possible to check contributors’ handle names) to create a massive reference resource. The anonymous collaborative nature of wikis makes it an attractive tool to use in language learning environments as well (Lund, Reference Lund2008; Yates, Reference Yates2008), but there is still surprisingly little written about using wikis in this capacity. Work that has been done has focused on the wiki’s appropriateness as a tool for learners to work together to create shared documents (e.g. Kessler, Reference Kessler2009) and participants’ editorial behavior in composing a document through a wiki (Kessler and Bikowski, 2010). Feedback regarding using wikis by learners has been mixed. While some learners claim that they feel encouraged by the fact that someone can come back and correct what they have written so that they can focus more on content than on linguistic aspects, others have been more negative with respect to having entries changed or deleted by others even though it was correct (Lund, Reference Lund2008) and not feeling comfortable in correcting their peers’ writing (Lee, Reference Lee2010).

Social networking sites

Social networking systems (SNSs) like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have rapidly gained in popularity since their emergence in 2005. Social networking sites are potentially useful for language learning, where learners can choose with whom they interact by viewing their profiles, and then discuss common topics of interest or share photographs or videos with them. In this way, learners can, to a degree, tailor the input that they receive, making it more relevant to their individual needs. One example of investigating SNSs for language learning is by Pasfield-Neofitou (Reference Pasfield-Neofitou2010), who examined learners of Japanese in their spontaneous personal use of CMC with native speakers. In her study, she found that email still remained by far the most commonly used method of interacting with one another, although a small number of the participants also used Facebook. The Japanese social networking site Mixi, however, was the most commonly used site, undoubtedly due to the fact that the learners were interacting with Japanese native speakers and that the site is well established in Japan. MySpace was hardly used by the participants in the study, but in the case of both Facebook and Mixi, participants sent messages as an alternative to using email, as well as posting photographs and videos. Twitter differs from Facebook and MySpace in that it is intended for sending very short postings and, as Mork (Reference Mork2009) describes, this makes it convenient for sending out small pieces of information either to individual students or to the class, without fear of filling up their mailboxes.

One form of social networking, social bookmarking websites, can be used as a hub for sharing information and opinions. Registered users are able to save links to articles on their personal page, which can be shared by others, and in much the same way as social networking websites, approved visitors can leave notes and comments under each bookmark. In a study investigating the use of social bookmarking sites for language learning, Prichard (Reference Prichard2010) used a site called Diigo in an English as a foreign language (EFL) reading class at a university in Japan. The students were asked to read two or more articles they or their classmates found on the Internet every week, add a tag to each article (e.g. sports, health, etc.) and write a short summary and reaction on the social bookmarking site. Other students added extra comments on the bookmarked articles and decided whether they liked the article or not by clicking on the “like” button. In this way, learners were able to share information that they found interesting with one another and read articles that received favorable reviews from other students. It is perhaps this point that is one of the advantages of social networking, where learners have the ability to be selective in the input that they receive in terms of both the areas of interest and with whom they choose to interact.

Virtual environments

Virtual environments for language learning have developed quite dramatically over the past several years. From the early 1990s, multi-user domain object oriented (MOOs) have been used in education due to their potential for learning, teaching, and training (Mateas and Lewis, Reference Mateas and Lewis1996; Shield, Reference Shield and Felix2003; see Chapter 7). Early MOOs were entirely text-based, and a number of MOOs for language learning purposes were developed, such as SchMOOze University for English learners and LeMOOFrançaise for learners of French. Although these text-based MOOs did receive attention for some time from the mid-1990s, they have all but been replaced by graphic MOOs (now more generally referred to as multi-user virtual environments, or MUVEs), through which users can navigate using an avatar of their choice as their self-manifestation. While most of the currently available virtual environments were developed as a means of social networking rather than for learning purposes, using avatars as these environments does make it possible to maintain anonymity, enabling learners to take risks in communication that they may be less willing to take if their actual identity is known. This means that learners can feel more comfortable about using the target language and thus potentially increases opportunities to communicate.

There are currently two major MUVEs which have been used in second language learning; Active Worlds and Second Life. Active Worlds allows its users to create 3D virtual worlds where they can communicate with each other through text-based chat (Toyoda and Harrison, Reference Toyoda and Harrison2002) although it was later equipped with a real-time voice communication component (Peterson, Reference Peterson2008). Second Life resembles Active Worlds in that it is also a 3D world that can be explored and manipulated by the participants, and contains both text and voice chat. Second Life allows users to also play recordings and slide shows and to teleport to other places or worlds at will (Stevens, Reference Stevens2006). There are examples of both of these environments being used for language learning purposes. Svensson (Reference Svensson and Felix2003), for instance, used Active Worlds to provide learners with an environment where they could perform presentations in front of other students in a virtual classroom, whereas Toyoda and Harrison (Reference Toyoda and Harrison2002) created an online virtual university campus using Active Worlds for Japanese learners to communicate with native speakers of Japanese. Although it was viewed positively by the learners, Toyoda and Harrison found that while actions such as waving, dancing, and fighting were possible in the environment, the program did not allow users to control their avatars to behave in culturally appropriate ways within the context of the target culture (i.e. bowing). Despite communication taking place entirely through text chat, they found that there were multiple instances of negotiation of meaning observed in the interactions as learners carried out conversations with participants in the environment.

With the gradual decline in popularity of Active Worlds (Stevens, Reference Stevens2006), Second Life seems to be taking over the role that it once played, and research on this MUVE is also starting to appear. In one such example, Peterson (Reference Peterson2010a) used Second Life in much the same way that Toyoda and Harrison used Active Worlds above, with the learners communicating via text chat in an online virtual university, noting that the interactions were largely learner-centered rather than being led by the teacher. In another study, Deutschmann et al. (Reference Deutschmann, Panichi and Molka-Danielsen2009) examined Second Life to determine how learners viewed the virtual environment for learning purposes and whether it could contribute to increased participation. In contrast to the text chat used in the previous examples, learners communicated using real-time voice chat, and while there were technical difficulties in early communication, learners appeared to become gradually more comfortable over time. Some notable results from the study included that many learners felt more comfortable hiding behind their avatar, but that role-play activities learners engaged in relatively easily in a face-to-face environment did not translate as well as expected in the virtual environment, with the technology acting as a hindrance to communication as learners struggled with how to work out the interface. It should also be noted that technical difficulties were cited in the early stages of each of the studies. Both the studies by Deutschmann et al. (Reference Deutschmann, Panichi and Molka-Danielsen2009) and Toyoda and Harrison (Reference Toyoda and Harrison2002) indicated that learners did not manipulate their avatars very much, and focused their concentration on engaging in the communication rather than on the avatars. Thus, it may be possible to conclude from this that if the technology is overly complicated, it has the potential to detract from the objectives at hand rather than facilitating them.

It is important to note that in virtual worlds the outcomes depend on the participants. This means that, as in any offline environment, there is a need for teachers to have concrete objectives in mind, and to make these objectives clear to the learners. Failure to do this could result in a similar situation as to what would happen in an uncontrolled face-to-face environment (with or without technology) where learners may start engaging in activities that are not relevant to their language learning purposes. In a virtual environment, however, unless there are controls in place to prevent outside interruption, the learners can very easily be distracted by other non-learner participants or even simply teleport away to other distant virtual places.

Online games

In much the same way as Active Worlds and Second Life, online games allow learners to experience the target language in a virtual environment, either individually or with other players. In single-player games, learners interact with characters that appear in the game in order to carry out certain activities, whereas massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) allow participants of games to communicate with each other online through text or voice, depending on game consoles and games. In either case, the outcomes of the games are, however, decided by the game, not by the participants. This is an area still very much in its infancy, but there have been a small number of researchers who have explored the possibilities of using online games as a second language (L2) learning tool.

For example, Purushotma (Reference Purushotma2005) examined affordances of a single-player simulation game called The Sims as a language learning tool, and noted that the three-dimensional (3D) environments provided in the game were similar to what tertiary-level foreign language learners would learn in their classes. By using a foreign language version of The Sims, learners were able to simulate their virtual life in the L2 with the assistance of first language (L1) annotations. Language acquisition may also be possible using simulations, as suggested by Ranalli (Reference Ranalli2008), who found that learners exhibited gains in vocabulary as a result of using The Sims for studying English. In other gaming environments, Rankin et al. (Reference Rankin, Gold and Gooch2006a, Reference Rankin, Gold and Gooch2006b) studied Ever Quest II for its capabilities of providing L2 learning opportunities. Rankin et al. (Reference Rankin, Gold and Gooch2006a) argue that MMORPGs support situated learning to provide immersive learning environments that promote deep and conceptual knowledge of a particular domain. They also claim that MMORPGs provide opportunities to L2 learners to engage in authentic social interaction among native and non-native players. In a pilot study by Rankin et al. (Reference Rankin, Gold and Gooch2006b) using MMORPGs for language learning, four ESL students played Ever Quest II for four hours a week for four weeks. Like Second Life, learners chose their avatars from a range of races, professions, and classes to complete sixty levels of quests. Players could interact with characters in the game to receive information for completing quests. The students took the part of playing characters (PCs), which were actively involved in the quest, and interacted with non-playing characters (NPCs), which gave directions and provided information but were not involved in the quest. The results indicated all four participants were able to identify 35 percent or more words that appeared only once in the interactions with the NPCs, and 55 percent of the words that appeared more than five times. However, the lower-level students struggled more to adapt to the virtual environment as they needed more support to navigate through the game and comprehend the information on the screen. A detailed overview of the potential of MMORPGs in language learning has been provided by Peterson (Reference Peterson2010b).

In both cases above, participants were not required to engage in physical activity in the games, except for a minimal amount of actions such as clicking on objects on a screen with a mouse or typing with a keyboard. The Nintendo Wii game console has had a large influence on the way game participants play virtual games. The Wii game console comes with a wireless game controller that allows the player’s avatar to move in the virtual environment of the games in approximately the same way one might move in the real world. This has implications for its use as an educational tool. Through an examination of the affordances of the Wii, Morgan et al. (Reference Morgan, Butler and Power2007) claim that the controller enables the manifestation of behaviorist learning theory, and as learners need to physically engage in the interaction sequences through actually moving their bodies to achieve the goals in the game, the tasks the learners are engaged in can be argued as being more authentic. Although learners can play virtual games individually, as with other interfaces, the multiplayer mode allows learners to work collaboratively.

Learning context

The learners were students in an Australian high school with little or no opportunity to interact in Japanese, so an arrangement was made with a high school in Japan so that they could engage in authentic interactions with Japanese native speakers of around their own age. There were twenty-five Australian and thirty-five Japanese students who engaged in posting messages to each other via the BBS in order to create a web page based on cultural issues pertaining to each other’s culture. Learners posted messages to the BBS collaboratively, meaning that there was interaction between the Australian and Japanese students through the computer, as well as face-to-face interactions that occurred between participants as they read and drafted the BBS postings for their interlocutors. Learners were required to work in small groups of three or four students at a single computer in order to read and post the messages to the BBS. The students used both English and Japanese to communicate with each other, by completing a few group tasks and one individual task each week. The language used for communication alternated each week. An element of tandem learning (Brammerts, Reference Brammerts and Warschauer1996; Calvert, Reference Calvert1992) and reciprocal teaching was also incorporated into this project where the Australian students were to learn Japanese from their Japanese partners, and the Japanese students were to learn English from the Australian students. In other words, they were set to teach each other, and learn from each other as native speakers of one language and learners of the other. The CALL classes were integrated at a class level in that one fifty-minute class per week (out of four classes per week) was dedicated to completing the CALL activities, although the CALL component was not included in their assessment. The Australian students were audio and video recorded in order to examine how they interacted with each other while engaged in the tasks. Interactions from the BBS exchanges were also collected, but were not used in the current study.

Activities completed by the learners

The topics of the tasks were carefully selected in advance of the interactions taking place by the teachers of both the Australian and Japanese schools and the researcher, to elicit the students’ interest in the target culture and language. The topics of the tasks were related to the issues that the Australian students covered in previous years, so that the students could actually use the vocabulary they had already learned during their classes in communication with the Japanese partners. This view of task arrangement is in line with Skourtou’s (Reference Skourtou2002) view of selecting activities for online communication that promote activation of students’ prior knowledge. Themes for the bulletin board discussions were decided by the researcher and the teachers, in both the Australian and Japanese schools. The themes, leisure and sport, shopping, famous people, festivals, and fashion, changed at approximately monthly intervals. The students were to ask at least one question every week to their counterparts, to sustain their interaction on the bulletin board (see Stockwell, Reference Stockwell2003). Towards the end of the project, each group of students was required to create a web page based on their bulletin board discussions. The design and content of the web pages were of their choice, but they needed to include what they had learned from their BBS discussions. The students were asked to choose one or more topics from the themes from their online discussions for web page production. The software for web page production was Macromedia Dreamweaver MX (currently called Adobe Dreamweaver) or Microsoft Word, both of which were already installed on the school computers for other subjects.

Observations

Students engaged in two different channels of communication for task completion: group interaction around computers, and written exchanges between the Australian and Japanese students. As the task involved composing and reading postings on the BBS with group members, one channel of communication was the oral interaction among group members as a process task completion, involving computers by forming a “triangular relationship” (Leahy, 2004, p. 133). This triangular relationship made it possible for the students to share thoughts and L2 knowledge, generating a flow of knowledge among students. The example below (Example 1) shows that two students are negotiating the correct spelling of the name of a Japanese athlete written in a L1 message by looking at the words shown on the computer screen.

Example (1)

AU4 is typing a message in English regarding a Japanese tennis player, Ai Sugiyama (line 1). AU22 is providing the content of the message for AU4 to type. She notices and mentions that AU4 did not insert a space in between ai, the first name and sugiyama, the last name (line 2, also see the text outcome). Although the sentence is not free of error, even after the correction, because AU4 failed to capitalize the “A” and “S” in “ai sugiyama,” AU22 guided AU4 to write the Japanese athlete’s name more appropriately, by telling AU4 to insert a space between “ai” and “sugiyama.” The computer in this example allowed the students to share their output as they typed. Thus, the computer facilitated peer collaboration, revision, and negotiation on the message that appeared on the screen.

This environment also worked in favor of L2 instruction for the teacher, as the messages on computers served as “anchored referents” (Meskill, Reference Meskill2005), which were used while the teacher was helping students decoding L2 messages posted by the Japanese students and revising their own L2 messages. This face-to-face environment also contributed to producing oral L2 output, individually or together with group members, by reading aloud L2 messages, both composed by themselves and the Japanese partners, during a course of task completion. In the following example (Example 2), three students are reading a L2 message posted by their Japanese counterpart. Their teacher is trying to assist them with decoding the meaning of the text without giving them the translation of the message in focus.

Example (2)

The teacher is reading a sentence on the computer screen aloud (line 1). AU1 asks if “itsu” is “have been” (line 2). The teacher provides a recast, by repeating the whole sentence, “itsu desu ka?” (line 3). Together with a recast, the teacher provides two different questions that include “itsu desu ka?” within the questions, to help AU1 work out the meaning of “itsu desu ka?” (line 3). AU1 still is not able to deduce the meaning from the examples provided, and asks if the question means “is it?” (line 4). The teacher reveals that “itsu” is “when” (line 5), and “itsu desu ka?” is “when is it?” (line 8). The teacher, therefore, used the recast to show it was “itsu desu ka?” that the students needed to understand, rather than “itsu” only. She highlighted the phrase, by giving the students a few examples of phrases that included “itsu desu ka?” to have them deduct the meaning of “itsu desu ka?” from the examples, without giving out the answer. After AU1 gave the teacher another erroneous answer (in line 4), she gave the students the correct answer, but only by telling them “itsu” meant “when,” still not giving out the translation of the entire phrase “itsu desu ka?” (line 5). The teacher was, probably, waiting for the students to translate the whole phrase by themselves; however, after the students’ interjections (lines 6 and 7) she provided the answer (line 8). In this example, the role of the computer screen is not visible. However, the students and the teacher are all looking at the screen to discuss the meaning of the message.

The computer screen served as a display of the L2 messages, a meeting point of the Australian and the Japanese students’ communication, and the source of learning new words and phrases with the help of their teacher. The following example (Example 3), however, shows a clear role of the computer. In this example, two students (AU10 and AU11) are composing a message in their L2 with some help from their teacher. AU10 is invisible in this conversation as she is participating in this activity by sitting next to AU11, looking at the screen, possibly thinking or observing.

Example (3)

The teacher is reading a sentence written by the Australian students, shown on the computer screen (line 1). She then utters a new sentence “ichiban ni natta uma” followed by its translation (line 2). She goes on and tries different forms (line 3). AU11 is listening and typing, while the teacher is uttering different forms, and asks if the spelling for “natta” has double T (line 4). The teacher reads the sentence that AU11 composed on the screen, and assures that her writing is correct this time (line 5). This example is different from the oral recasts presented in the previous example, as the communication between the students and the teacher is exchanged through what was written on the computer screen. AU11 expressed her thoughts through the screen by ongoing typing, and the teacher provided recasts of the sentence that appeared on the screen as AU11 was typing. The teacher also appears to elucidate the correct form, by providing recasts and repeating a few different forms. However, the teacher’s speech seems to have worked as a guide for AU11, to come up with the correct form of the L2 sentence. In this example, the students and the teacher were sharing their thoughts by reading AU11’s ongoing typing on the screen, and by speaking out their thoughts. As the screen broadcast AU11’s real-time editing process, the participants of the conversation around this computer were able to share the cognitive process of the typist and the people who influenced the typist’s thought, which resulted in altering the message on the screen.