Innovation in Language Learning

Due to the access Brazilian are having to ICT through a more balanced economic situation, professors have witnessed the presence of smartphones and tablets inside classrooms. This research assesses the pedagogical resources designed to promote English learning via T.A.L.L (Tablet-Assisted-Language-Learning) or M.A.L.L (Mobile-Assisted-Language-Learning) from two applications: Busuu and Babbel. This study may help the assessment of both apps and it will be considered to the implementation of one of them in the English Language Graduation course syllabus from Universidade Tiradentes in Brazil. We believe that apps focused on SLA (Second Language Acquisition) are somehow used by university graduates around the world who are also digital natives (Prensky, 2001) and “eager about technology use” (Leu, 2004). This access to gadgets helps mobile learning (m-learning) as it happens anywhere, in special outside of class, it is focused on the student and it is “thoroughly ubiquitous” (Valk 2010). To Vavoula (2005), “any learning situation that is not at fixed predetermined location has to be defined as m-learning”. We investigate their applications to L2 learning on this study. The pedagogical aspects that derive from learning through an online community reinforce SLA according to Krashen (1981) language acquisition theory of i+1 as much as Vygostky’s (2002) knowledge of Zone of Proximal Development and Thorne and Payne (2005) theory for podcasts. It also reinforces the concepts of Lan (2007), where “language learning is no longer limited to one-way individual learning, but can be expanded to a two- or multi-way collaborative learning”. This pedagogical procedure will prepare “future teachers of the idiom to the reality of their audience in post-modern educational times” (Campos, 2008). As methodology, I decided to perform an Action Research (AR) because according to Torbert (2004), AR is “an action that helps individuals, teams and organizations become more capable of self-transformation and thus more creative and more aware”. We will assess all possibilities presented for English learning on the applications named Busuu and Babbel, study their HCI (human-computer interaction) and classes’ content, language progress, choice of vocabulary, themes, dialogues and finally, the pedagogical approach focused on SLA. The final results will identify which app would be implemented as an official content for the subjects English Language I and English Language II. Summing up, tablets/smartphones are here to stay, at households and educational institutions, and as Brazilians hosted the World Cup and will host the next Olympics Games in 2016 learning English is not a personal option for our population – it is an urgent necessity.