Mobility in Learning: The Feasibility of Encouraging Language Learning on Smartphones

Abstract

Technology can be defined as anything which humans have created to shape their environment, from individual tools used in daily life to the systems and institutions which guide and define our societies. As such, technology is a “social and cultural phenomenon” (Kukulska-Hulme, 2009, p. 158) which “cannot but influence the ways in which people learn” (Beetham & Sharpe, 2007, p. 6). Within language learning contexts, one of the main discussions about technology is in the integration, or normalisation (Chambers & Bax, 2006), of the technology into the language curriculum. This concept of normalisation is when the technology is “as invisible and natural as whiteboards and pens” (p. 466) and it is only with this invisibility that technology will “have found its proper place in language education” (p. 466).