Innovation in Language Learning

During informal conversations and in a questionnaire preceding this work, students and teachers of Spanish as a foreign language from four different Swedish cities confirmed that language teachers sometimes approach the curricular goal of teaching culture by letting their students search through material online in the target language. This is also confirmed by previous studies [Estling Vanneståhl & Granath, 2008] If this, then, is what some people do in their language lessons, a study is warranted that researches what actually happens when students in Spanish use different resources while searching for task-specific information online. Hence, this study aims to inform the current discussion on ICT usage for pedagogical purposes, by studying how some upper secondary students of Spanish choose to use different resources when faced with an information searching group task aimed at reading authentic web sites.

These resources could be both on –and offline, comprised of different modes and expressed through different media. Some examples of resources could be dictionaries, mobile phones, talking to group members for different purposes or using web sites such as Google Docs that help further the work in a meaningful way. They could also have to do with what language one chooses to use, drawing on earlier subject knowledge or with how one distributes time.

In line with the above aim, the individual research questions are the following:

·         What resources does the teacher give and what resources do the interacting students use?

·         What is detectable concerning students’ agency as seen through their overall resource usage as well as their particular resource usage of Spanish?

·         What do the students and the teacher express about this way of working?

Primary data was collected through screen recordings, video and audio recordings, and prompted interviews. Multimodal Interactional Analysis (MIA) [Norris, 2004] was used as the framework for analysis of data, which was transcribed in Multimodal Interactional Protocols (IAPs) [Bezemer & Mavers, 2011].

Some results of this work in progress show that students did not use the teacher, paper dictionaries, pens, papers or phones as resources. While reading online they used the resources of time, choice and group talk differently that what the teacher expected. They become producers rather than consumers of information. They think they become active and motivated learners who enjoy using authentic sources and active collaborative authorship where they can solve the task in spite of low language knowledge. On the other hand, they think the work is time consuming and feel like they learn very little Spanish. There is a speed and presentation focus at the cost of learning process focus, where the latter is one of the teachers’ main priorities.