The Future Use of Cell phones in Teaching Language

J+ Kiernan+, Patrick +Kazumi + Aizawa (2004). Cell phones in task based learning - Are cell phones useful language learning tools? Cambridge University Press New York, NY, USA, 16, Retrieved 04/30/09, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1008784


There are new initiatives and researches conducted on Cell phones usefulness in teaching and learning language. It can be said that such initiatives are early attempts of investigation to set up steps of how educators and teachers integrate these handheld tools into classroom learning, since it is known that cell phones are wide spread allover many countries among students in different educational cycles. Yes, Cell phones as handheld devices are now wide spread in many countries including the USA where we teach Language, are now particularly popular among university and college students. Although they can be a distraction in the classroom, functions such internet access and email capability have transformed them into useful communication tools. Cell phones have the ability in building virtual community, such a community will be helpful in teaching language, as learners can have an opportunity to talk and discuss in the target language with the native speakers. The research started from placing the following question. Are cell phones potentially useful in language learning? While task-based approaches (Nunan, 1989) adapted to desktop email are now a growing area of research in CALL (Greenfield, 2003; Gonzalez-LIoret, 2003), cell phones have not yet received much attention. The research was done in a classroom aimed at evaluating the use of mobile phones as tools for classroom learning. The experiment was done on students from two Elementary classes and two lower Intermediate, were first surveyed regarding their cell phones use and pre-tested to assess their knowledge of certain target learning structures. The students were divided into three small groups as follows:-
Ø Group A using cell phones text messages.
Ø Group B using computer email.
Ø Group C speaking.
The students were paired, trained with warm-up tasks and assigned to more tasks to complete in a classroom and the other at home. The target vocabulary appeared in the initial narrative task. All messages sent while doing the task was saved for analysis. The speaking task pairs were recorded and a few samples were transcribed for comparison. At the end of the experiment, the students took a post test in order to assess their learning gains. The experiment results drew the attention to some of potential benefits of mobile phones as well as highlighting some limitations, but in general, suggested that mobile phones represent a Language learning resource worthy of further investigations.
I think that such a study will excite, stimulate and encourage many educators and teachers who concern about the integration of technologies into education, to conduct many researches and studies about the future use of cell phones in teaching and learning language. Also new application software may be needed to overcome the distraction that might happen to the teacher while receiving feedback from students.
I suggested that, teachers can set up time for receiving feedback, answering questions and giving instructions for new assignment. Thus might not make any distraction in the classroom.


Reference:
http://webpages.cs.luc.edu/~laufer/papers/msec03.pdf