By Àngels Pinyana
Technological advances have made mobiles more efficient, user friendly, and adaptable to different purposes. As mobile devices have become more ubiquitous, so have the mobile apps and social networking sites that aim to help teachers and students take advantage of such ubiquity. According to different authors, these apps promote interaction among users, fostering collaborative learning and improving motivation, and they also seem to boost vocabulary knowledge. However, it is the portability of the mobile devices themselves, and above all, the capacity to erase the physical and temporal limits of the classroom, what makes mobile learning especially suitable to study at anytime and anywhere, both for formal and informal learning.
Instant messaging applications in particular, like WhatsApp, appear to have great potential for educational purposes mainly because of the type of communication and discourse they produce. In terms of communication, WhatsApp facilitates quick and interactive multimedia exchange of information either in one-to-one or in closed-group interactions in real time, synchronically or quasi-synchronically, while being physically distant. And in terms of discourse, WhatsApp generates a type of discourse that not only incorporates features of both written and oral varieties of the language, but it also may combine visual, verbal and acoustic elements. All of this conforms WhatsApp as a rich setting for multimodal communication to occur.
The article “Extending language learning beyond the EFL classroom through WhatsApp” by Elsa Tragant, Àngels Pinyana, Jessica Mackay and Maria Andria, published in Computer Assisted Language Learning (2021), explores the type of communication produced by a group of foreign language learning students when they voluntarily engage in different language learning tasks, initiated by the teacher, in a WhatsApp group. The study describes how the language tasks were enacted, how the chat was also used for informal communication among peers and with the teacher, as well as how negotiation and participation in the chat evolved over time.
The analysis of the messages produced showed that many of the students in the group voluntarily practiced the target language outside class time and engaged in real communication through their mobile devices. The fact that the chat was voluntary did not stop students from showing high levels of engagement in performing these tasks, often producing long, pragmatically appropriate messages and extended conversations. The longitudinal analysis of the data, however, revealed that participation fluctuated across tasks, and that the WhatsApp group, over time, became a means of informal, off-task communication, which the teacher had not planned. Spontaneity and authenticity were evident in these off-task conversations and resulted in increased rates of participation.
All in all, instant messaging seems to be a relevant pedagogical resource that is worth considering when designing foreign language courses that aim at promoting L2 use, as the messages generated both when students are completing a teacher-initiated task, or when they are communicating off-task, seem to be equally productive in engaging students to use English beyond the walls of the classroom.
