Listening with mobile devices: An ecological approach to context-embedded learning

This presentation at the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) conference discussed a design-based research study which investigated and refined the best design principles for listening tasks using mobile devices. The participants in the study were overseas-trained professionals needing to improve their English listening skills in order to better and more fully participate in Canadian society and as professionals in their areas of training. By using mobile devices, participants were able to interact with real language, real people and in real-life contexts, in which they collected samples of English being used outside of the classroom and interacted with both classmates and people in the streets using support accessed through their mobile devices. The theoretical basis for the design approach taken used a newly emerging theory called ecological constructivism to describe and predict how these learner-participants interacted using English and learned new vocabulary, expressions and information about the city in which they live.This presentation discusses a design-based research (DBR) study into effective design for teaching listening in the real world using mobile devices. An emergent theory of learning, ecological constructivism (EC), was chosen as the theory that best fit the learner interactions, as well as the affordances and constraints presented by the real-world learning environment. This DBR project was an ideal vehicle to iteratively test and refine the EC theory and its various constituent principles. EC is discussed as a theory that both accommodates and explains context-embedded language learning. A brief overview of the study and its results is also presented