Over the coming weeks I will be asking applied linguists working in a range of settings and countries to answer the following two broad questions:
- Looking ahead 10 years, what do you think is one of the greatest challenges facing the field of applied linguistics?
- And similarly, where do you see the greatest opportunities?
Here is the first reply, from Mark Pegrum, from the University of Western Australia. More info on Mark’s work here: http://elanguage.edublogs.org/
Mark will be publishing a book on ‘mobile language and literacy learning’ in the ‘New Learning Environments‘ series I edit for Palgrave Macmillan.
We hear a lot about the affordances of mobile technologies for language teaching and learning in the developed world, and there are many published reports of mostly small-scale projects exploring their potential to enable new types of learning, in some cases by new types of learners. More research is needed in the form of larger scale projects, as well as metacommentary which pulls emerging insights together in a comprehensible format. But an even bigger challenge is to investigate the use of mobile technologies for the teaching and learning of language and literacy in the developing world. While many of the affordances of mobile technologies which we hear about in the developed world are largely absent, due to the fact that many people use basic or feature phones rather than smart phones and tablets, it is here that mobile learning has the potential to reach the largest number of users. What’s more, in the developing world there have been numerous large-scale projects, in some cases involving millions of users, but they are often not written up in any detail in the research literature, nor drawn into our broader reflections about mobile approaches. Pulling insights from the developed and developing world together seems to me to present a great opportunity to further develop this field.
