The ‘student-K’ paradox- How ineffective classroom learning can enhance language proficiency and implications for MFL instruction

July 9, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

Recently, I have been undertaking lots of research into vocabulary acquisition in order to enhance the learning potential of my website (www.language-gym.com) at a time when it is undergoing massive restructuring and expansion. But as always with ‘paper’-based research, I felt something important was missing: the student’s views on how learning occurs; not in its dry, ‘scientific’ representation by scholars and researchers, but as articulated by the learners’ themselves.

Hence, I turned to my students and, as I usually do every term, I carried out a few semi-structured interviews with my most effective and least effective students. As always, the findings were fascinating. Today, one student in particular, ‘K’, yielded the most interesting data ever, as they referred to an apparently paradoxical phenomenon that I had never heard of or read about before; what I will refer to, from now on, in my personal jargon, as the ‘student-K paradox’. But who is ‘Student K’? And what is this ‘student-K paradox?’

‘K’ is the dream language student every effective language teacher would love to teach and every less effective teacher would fear to have in their classes: the hyper-talented, driven, inquisitive and risk-taking student who, however meaty your lesson content is, however ambitious your learning intentions are, will always ask you for more – more words, more grammar, more resources, more challenge.

Despite never showing real interest for French or Spanish before the age of 11 – two years ago – and coasting through 2 years of French at Primary, K. has managed to attain at 13 a level of proficiency in both languages that I had never witnessed before in any individual of her age. Her spoken and written output is not only rich, varied, complex and accurate but seems to be produced effortlessly. Whilst interacting with her in spontaneous speech, one never detects any anxiety. What is particularly striking about her, is her vocabulary repertoire, which transcends by far the boundaries of an excellent GCSE student – and she is only Year 9!

But how did she get there? This is the most interesting bit; the answer is: because she felt that in year 5 and 6 she was not learning much in class. She felt that her teacher’s approach just wasn’t working for her. She gave too many worksheets, teaching too much grammar causing an information and cognitive overload not supported by effective recycling that K just could not handle. In addition, she felt the approach was overly prescriptive and ‘narrow’ in terms of learning scope; she felt she was not progressing and grew increasingly worried about it.

So, K decided to address the issue by taking on French grammar on her own, at home. She started googling the grammar points she felt her teacher did not teach her properly; study independently; taking notes; doing online activities; reading and translating independently, etc. until she ‘nailed’ the verbs and tenses she had not managed to learn in class. In other words, the anxiety she felt in class for not being able to learn from her teacher’s input paradoxically enhanced her learning as she self-initiated activities which widened her lexical repertoire and improved her knowledge of the target grammar. She would then try out the lexical and grammar items learnt through this process in class so as to obtain teacher feedback (vocabulary and grammar activation). It would be interesting to know whether K would have learnt more than she did autonomously had the teacher taught her more effectively. Probably not…

Another crucial acquisition factor she mentioned was the new teacher she had in Year 7 who allegedly inspired her to go beyond the vocabulary set by the book and the schemes of work. She found the lessons with the new teacher more fun – although in the interview she could not articulate why. The teacher would encourage her to be creative and risk-taking with the language and gave her additional vocabulary lists she would eagerly learn independently at home. Studying these vocabulary lists – in the most traditional way ever, i.e. rote learning – became almost an obsession for her.

Another strategy that she began using was to read the multilingual instructions that came with whatever product (e.g. electrical appliances, gadgets, computers) her or her parents bought, so as to learn new vocabulary. She also said that whenever she said or thought of a ‘cool’ phrase or sentence in English she would try to translate it into French using dictionaries or by asking the teacher for help with it.

Student K’s case is impressive in many respects and, if it were true of other talented linguists of similar caliber it would have important implications for learning. First and foremost, K’s story clearly illustrates how powerful facilitative anxiety can be in enhancing learning; facilitative anxiety, as conceptualized by Macintyre and Gardner (1989) refers to the state of arousal caused by mild levels of anxiety which may push a student to do better at something (e.g. my current approach is not working; I need to do something about it!). Obviously, this does not entail that teacher should deliberate be ineffective in class in order to foster effective autonomous learning. However, it does indicate that autonomous work by a student as young as K can yield amazing results; hence, teachers may have to find strategies to motivate students to learn vocabulary autonomously at home – easier these days due to the availability of mobile digital technology. Although equipping the students with effective vocabulary learning strategies may be important, K’s case shows that inspiring them, make them want to learn vocabulary independently may be more crucial.

K’s learning behaviour also seems to confirm Gu and Johnson’s (1996) finding that self-initiation and activation can play a huge role in vocabulary acquisition. K requested extra vocabulary lists and worked on them alone at home (self-initiation); she would then deliberately use the new words learnt from those lists in class to try them out in context to see if the use she made of them was accurate (activation). The implication is that teaching should concern itself much more than it currently does with modelling these two independent learning behaviours. I can identify with this, especially in my learning of English, Spanish, French and German; less so, with my Swedish and Malay – is this why I speak them much less fluently?

K’s use of vocabulary lists to learn new lexis is also interesting as it goes against what I have always said to my trainees. K does not use fancy mnemonic devices or engaging online vocabulary-building games. Yet, her vocabulary repertoire is vast and varied. This goes to show that motivation and the focal awareness it places on the target linguistic items can seriously impact vocabulary learning. To brush aside the old-fashioned way of using word pairs based on the argument that it is boring or obsolete may be wrong, after all. And K’s preference for word lists is echoed by a number of recent studies that show the superiority of this approach to vocabulary learning to the keyword technique.

Another important implication relates to G and T (gifted and talented) provision in schools. Teachers are often recommended to teach G & T students through higher order thinking tasks. On the other hand, K’s case defies this notion; learning L1/L2 word pairs from a vocabulary list does hardly involve higher order thinking skill. The implications for learning are that to best cater for our learners’ needs we may need to ask them what their preferred learning tools and strategies are rather than using our presumptions as to what best suits their higher cognitive and linguistic capabilities.

K’s learning strategy involving using multilingual translations, kind of echoes my point in a previous post on how parallel texts can foster vocabulary acquisition. It is an easy way to notice and learn the differences between the L1 and the L2 as well learn new words effortlessly.

Last, but not least, the impact of the inspiring teacher on K’s learning. K did self-initiate autonomous learning in order to compensate for the lack of progress in lessons; however, it was the inspiring teacher who brought her learning to another level by being less prescriptive than her predecessor and by letting K go beyond the learning intentions boundaries set in each lesson.

In conclusion, my interview with student K was a real ‘eye-opener’ as it defied many of my pre-conceptions about effective learning. Teachers ought to set aside some time every so often to interview students as a means to understand them better and sync their teaching to their needs – it can be one of the best professional development practices they may ever get. K’s account of how she learns vocabulary made me understand so much more about her and about students like her. These learners may not necessarily need to be involved in higher order thinking skills; they may simply need to be inspired and encouraged to learn autonomously in ways that best suit them.

Nine interesting foreign language research findings you may not know about

July 7, 2015December 27, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Language acquisition principles, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

In this post I am going to share with the reader a very succinct summary of 9 pieces of research I have recently come across which I found interesting and have impacted my classroom practice in one way or another. They are not presented in any particular order.

Green and Hecht 1992 – Area: Explicit grammar instruction and teaching of aspect

Green and Hecht investigated 300 German learners of English. They asked them to correct 12 errors in context and to offer an explanation of the rule. Most interesting finding: the students could correct 78 % of the errors but could not provide an explanation for more than 46 % of the grammar rules that referred to those errors. They identified a set of rules that were hard to learn (i.e. most students did not recall them) and a set of easy rules (the vast majority of them could recall them successfully). Their implications for teaching: the explicit teaching of grammar may actually not work for all grammar items. For example, the teaching of aspect (e.g. Imperfect vs Preterite in Spanish), would be more effectively taught, according to them, by exposure to masses of comprehensible input (e.g. narrative texts) rather than through the use of PPTs or diagrams on the classroom whiteboard/screen – in fact Blyth (1997) and Macaro (2002a) demonstrated the futility of drawing horizontal lines interrupted by vertical ones to indicate that the perfect tense ends the action.

My conclusions: I do not entirely agree with Blyth and Macaro that explicit explanation of grammar in the realm of aspect does not work and I do like diagrams (although they do not work with all of one’s students). However, I do agree with Green and Hecht (1992) that the best way to teach aspect is through exposure to masses of comprehensible input containing examples of aspect in context. The grammar explanation and production phase may be carried out at a later stage.

Milton and Meara (1998) – Comparative study of vocabulary learning between German, English and Greek students aged 14-15 years.

197 students from the three countries studying similar syllabi for the same number of years were tested on their vocabulary. The findings were that:

1.The British students’ score was the worst (averaging at 60 %). According to the researchers, they showed a poor grasp of basic vocabulary ;

2.They spent less time learning and were set lower goals than their German and Greek counterparts;

3. 25 % of the British students scored so low (after four years of MFL learning) that the researchers questioned whether they had learnt anything at all.

The authors of the study also found that British learners are not necessarily worse in terms of language aptitude; rather, they questioned the effectiveness of MFL teaching in the UK.

My conclusions: this study is quite old and the sample they used may not be indicative of the overall British student population. If it were, though, representative of the general situation in Britain, teachers may have to – as I have advocated in several previous blogs of mine – consciously recycle words over and over again, not just within the same units, but across units.

Moreover a study of 850 EFL learners, by Gu and Johnson (1996), may indicate an important issue underlying our students poor vocabulary retention; they found that students who excelled in vocabulary size were those who used three metacognitive strategies in addition to the cognitive strategies used by less effective vocabulary learners : selective attention to words (deciding to focus on certain words worth memorizing), self-initiation (making an effort to learn beyond the classroom and the exam system) and deliberate activation of newly-learnt words (trying out using that word independently to obtain positive or negative feedback as to the correctness of their use) . Teaching should aim, in other words, at developing learner autonomy and motivation to apply all of these strategies independently outside the classroom.

Knight (1994) – Using dictionaries whilst reading – effects on vocabulary learning

Knight gave her subjects a text to read on a computer. One group had access to electronic dictionaries whilst the other did not. She found that those who did use the dictionary and not simply guessing strategies, actually scored higher in a subsequent vocabulary test. This and other previous (Luppescu and Day, 1993) and subsequent studies (Laufer & Hadar, 1997; Laufer & Hill, 2000; Laufer & Kimmel,1997) suggest that students should not be barred from using dictionaries in lessons. These findings are important for 1:1 (tablet or PC) school settings considering the availability of free online dictionaries (e.g. www.wordreference.com).

Anderson and Jordan (1998) – Rate of forgetting

Anderson and Jordan set out to investigate the number of words that could be recalled by their informants immediately after initial learning, 1 week, 3 weeks, and 8 weeks thereafter. They identified a learning rate of 66%, 48%, 39%, and 37% respectively. The obvious implication is that, if immediately after learning the subjects could not recall 66 % of the target vocabulary, consolidation should start then and continue (at spaced intervals – through recycling in lessons or as homework) for several weeks. At several points during the school year, I remind my students of Anderson and Jordan’s study and show them the following diagram. It usually strikes a chord with a lot of them:

Erler (2003) – Relationship between phonemic awareness and L2 reading proficiency

Erler set out to investigate the obstacles of learners of French as a foreign language in England. She studied 11-12 year olds. She found that there was a strong correlation between low level of phonemic awareness and reading skills (especialy word recognition skills). She concluded that explicit training and practice in the grapheme-phoneme system (i.e. how letters/combination of letters are pronounced) of French would improve L1-English learners’ reading proficiency in that language. This find corroborates other findings by Muter and Diethelm (2001) and Comeau et al (1999). The implications is that micro-listening enhancers of the like I discussed in a previous blog (e.g. ‘Micro-listening skills tasks you may not do in your lessons’) or any other teaching of phonics should be performed in class much more often than it is currently done in many UK MFL classrooms.

Please note: teaching pronunciation and decoding skills instruction are not the same thing. Pronunciation is about understanding how sounds are produced by the articulators, whilst teaching decoding skills means instructing learners on how to convert letters and combination of letters into sound. Also, effective decoding-skill instruction occurs in communicative contexts (whether through receptive or productive processing) not simply through matching sounds with gestures and/or phonetic symbols.

Feyten (1991) – Listening ability as predictor of success

Feyten investigated the possibility that listening ability may be a predictor of success in foreign language learning. The researcher assessed the students at pre-test using a variety of tasks and measures of listening proficiency. After a ten-week course she tested them again (post-test) and found that there was a strong correlation between listening ability and overall foreign language acquisition, i.e.: the students who had scored high at pre-test did better at post-test not just in listening, but also in written grammar, reading and vocabulary assessment. Listening was a better predictor of foreign language proficiency than any other individual factor (e.g. gender, previous learning history, etc.).

My implications: we should take listening more seriously than we currently do. Increased exposure to listening input and more frequent teaching of listening strategies are paramount in the light of such evidence. Any effective baseline assessment at the outset of a course ought to include a strong listening comprehension component; the latter ought to include a specific decoding-skill assessment element.

Graham (1997) – Identification of foreign language learners’ listening strategies

This study investigated the listening strategies of 17-year-old English learners of German and French. Amongst other things she found the following issues undermining their listening comprehension. Firstly, they were slow in identifying key items in a text. Secondly, they often misheard words or syllables and transcribed what they believed they had heard thereby getting distracted. Graham’s conclusions were that weaker students overcompensated for lack of lexical knowledge by overusing top-down strategies (e.g. spotting key words as an aid to grasp meaning).

My implications are that Graham’s research evidence, which echoes finding from Mendelsohn (1998) and other studies, should make us wary of getting students to over-rely on guessing strategies based on key-words recognition. Teachers should focus on bottom-up processing skills much more than they currently do, e.g. by practising (a) micro-listening skills; (b) narrow listening or any other listening instruction methodology which emphasizes recycling of the same vocabulary through comprehensible input (N.B. not necessarily through videos or audio-tracks; it can be teacher-based, in absence of other resources); (c) listening with transcripts – whole, gapped or manipulated in such a way as to focus learners on phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

Polio et al. (1998) – Effectiveness of editing instruction

Polio et al. (1998) set out to investigate whether additional editing instruction – the innovative feature of the study – would enhance learners’ ability to reduce errors in revised essays. 65 learners on a university EAP course were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group who wrote four journal entries each week for seven weeks. Whereas the control group did not receive any feedback, the experimental group was involved in (1) grammar review and editing exercises and (2) revision of the journal entries, both of which were followed by teacher corrective feedback. On each pre- and post-tests, the learners wrote a 30-minute composition which they were asked to improve in 60 minutes two days later. Linguistic accuracy was calculated as a ratio of error-free T-units to the total number of T-units in the composition.

The results suggested that the experimental group did not outperform the control group. The researchers conjectured that the validity of their results might have been undermined by the assessment measure used (T-units) and/or the relatively short duration of the treatment. They also hypothesised that the instruction the control group received might have been so effective that the additional practice for the experimental group did not make any difference.

The implications of this study are that editing instruction may take longer than seven weeks in order to be effective. Thus, the one-off editing instruction sessions that many teachers do on finding common errors in their students’ essays to address the grammar issues that refer to them, are absolutely futile, unless they are followed up by extensive and focused practice with lots of recycling.

Elliott (1995) – Effect of explicit instruction on pronunciation

Elliott set out to investigate the effects of improving learner attitude toward pronunciation and of explicitly teaching pronunciation on his subjects (66 L1 students of Spanish). He compared the experimental group (which received 10-15 minutes of instruction per lesson over a semester) with a group of students whose pronunciation was corrected only when it impeded understanding. The results were highly significant, both in terms of improved accent and of attitude (92 % of the informants being positive about the treatment). The experimental group outperformed the control group.

Implications: this study , which confirms evidence from several others (e.g. Elliot 1997; Zampini, 1994), confirms that explicit pronunciation instruction is more effective than implicit instruction whereby L2 learners are expected to learn pronunciation simply by exposure to comprehensible input. Arteaga’s (2000) review of US Spanish textbooks found that only 4 out of 10 Spanish textbooks include activities attempting to teach pronunciation. I suspect that the figure may be even lower in the UK. In the light of Elliott’s findings, this is quite appalling, as the mastery of phonology not only is a catalyst of reading ability but also of listening and speaking proficiency as well as playing an enormous role in Working Memory’s processing efficiency in general (see my blog: ‘ Eight important facts about Working Memory’).

The least talked-about yet most important attribute of an effective MFL teacher

July 3, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Affective factors in L2 learning, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

MFL teachers are typically involved in CPD events which deal with L2 teaching methodology and techniques, the use of technology in the classroom, motivational theory and practice, learning management and differentiation, AFL , lifelong-learning skills and team building. However, they rarely explicitly focus on enhancing the teacher attribute that is crucial to the success of all of that : Cognitive Empathy.

Cognitive Empathy (henceforth CE) refers to the teacher’s ability to sync every level of their teaching (e.g. planning lessons, classroom delivery, feedback provision, target-setting, setting out-of-the-classroom consolidation work) to their students’ cognition. It is a distinct construct to Emotional Empathy (another crucial attribute of an effective teacher), in that it does not concern itself with socio-affective empathising (reading our students’ emotional states), but rather with the understanding of what goes on through the MFL learner’s mind. CE and EE (emotional empathy) do overlap in some areas, but for CPD purposes they are best kept separate, whilst hammering home to teachers the importance of their mutual synergy : for either of them to effectively impact teaching and learning it needs to be supported by the other.

Someone may object that since a lot of effort is placed, in CPD, on differentiation, CE is not as ‘neglected’ as I claim. However, differentiation usually concerns itself with the implementation of techniques to tackle identified issues in our students’ cognition, but not with the identifications of the root causes of those problems.

And how about AFL strategies? Does formative assessment of the like envisaged by Dylan William not address this issue ? Yes and no. As I reserve to discuss below, it does so only partially and through means which do not delve deep enough into our students’ cognition. And as for Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences research, they are out of the equation as they are invalid constructs based on phony research.

Data obtained through baseline testing (i.e. MiddYS, Yellis, etc.) with alleged high predictive power are indeed useful. However, they provide but a snapshot of our students’ cognition at a specific moment in time. Also, teachers are rarely, if ever, trained in reading what the categories and scores made available to them actually mean and how they relate to our students’ learning.

CE, as I envisage it, requires 5 macro-competences :

(1) An awareness of the cognitive challenges posed by foreign language learning in general and by the specific language items one is teaching – especially in the planning of a lesson ;

(2) An understanding of how the target learners respond to such challenges. This also involves an awareness of how cognition in an MFL learning context is affected by individual variables (e.g. specific age group, gender, personality types, culture, etc.)

(3) Metacognition – Obviously, effective teachers constantly keep in their focal awareness the importance of syncing their teaching with the cognitive needs of their learners, but they must also :

constantly reflect on their practice as cognitively empathetic teachers , both before, during and after their lessons ;

use their own past experiences as language learners to enhance their levels of cognitive empathy ;
start and maintain an ongoing metacognitive dialogue with their learners (e.g. through feedback or learner reflective journals) ;
actively seek ways to further their understanding of learner cognitive needs (which relates to the next point).

(4) Research methodoly knowledge and skills – Teachers need to be able to discern between valid and ‘phony’ theory and research. This is important when one thinks of how some less than reliable research (e.g. the one of Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles) has affected us over the decades – with hardly any positive result – in terms of educational policies and prescribed pedagogical approaches. The ability to understand how reliable a piece of research is can prevent teachers from adopting teaching approaches or techniques acritically. Moreover, teachers need a degree of expertise on how to obtain and analyze useful data that may inform their curricular and methodological choices. For example, in my own practice, my mastery of the use of think-aloud protocols, interviews and retrospective verbal reports (acquired during my Ph.D and MA ) has helped me a great deal in terms of developing my understanding of students’ problems. On the other hand, lack of expertise in this domain often leads to an overliance on questionnaires (not valid research tools) which are not always well crafted (e.g. rarely include measures to reinforce their internal validity) or to other less than valid research practices. This overliance on questionnaires can be highly detrimental to teaching and learning, especially when the quantitative data obtained through such procedures are used as determinant of educational policies.

(5) Metadigital awareness – this is of crucial importance at this time of revolutionary technological advances as digital assisted learning is playing an important role in many MFL classrooms around the world. Teachers need to become increasingly aware of the impact of the specific digital medium (or media) they use in the classrom and internet based resources on learner cognition (see my article on the ‘Five central psychological challenges of mobile learning’). Knowing how a given technological device -and related apps – works and knowing how to use it effectively to enhance learning are two very different things. That is why, ICT integration coaches should not only be teachers with high levels of digital knowledge ; but, also, and most importantly, ought to be highly metacognizant outstanding practitioners deeply aware of how the internet and digital media affect students’ thinking and learning processes.

What are the implications for teacher professional development ?

Firstly, CPD should focus much more than it currently does on rendering MFL teachers highly conversant with current theory and research on language acquisition and on how they can inform effective classroom practice. The current practice of providing teachers with behavioural templates (e.g. tasks or sequence of tasks to use in class) disjointed from a solid reference framework is insufficient in generating high level of teaching competence.

Secondly, professional development should aim at expanding teacher understanding of how individual variables affect learning. For instance, psychological research has generated lots of useful taxonomies for the classification of personality types which can be very useful for teachers in understanding learner attitudes and behaviour. Such taxonomies (e.g. Myers and Briggs, see: http://www.personalitypage.com/high-level.html ) are used on a daily basis in the corporate world to assess and cater for staff, but rarely imparted on teachers. Moreover, there is quite a fairly solid body of research on how individual factors (e.g. aptitude, gender and age) interact with L2 language acquisition that teachers may benefit greatly from.

Thirdly, in the realm of metacognitive and teacher-skills enhancement, CPD should focus teachers on the importance of CE and scaffold self-reflection in this area whilst equipping them with the tools which can enhance it (e.g. the ones discussed in the previous two paragraphs.). Teachers should also be made conversant with effective approaches that can foster an ongloing metacognitive dialogue with the students vis-à-vis their learning needs. Some approaches and techniques useful in starting such dialogue, drawn from AFL practice (e.g. questionnaire/student voice and reflective journals), are quite common in many MFL classrooms ; others, like think-aloud, concurrent introspection and retrospective verbal reports (see my article on ‘Think-aloud’) are less frequently used but are more valuable in getting into our students’ thinking processes and identifying their learning problems.

Fourthly, for teachers to be able to effectively understand their learners’ thinking processes they must be conversant with some of the fundamentals of research methodology. CPD should focus on this important set of skills more than it is currently done and foster an environment conducive to classroom-based research (N.B. I am not envisaging PhD level research, here, but a much smaller scale and less formal kind). Schools often base their educational policies on data obtained from studies often geographically and culturally distant ; classroom-based research carried out within their walls, on the other hand, may be more relevant and therefore impact learning more effectively. Ultimately, an effective MFL classroom-based teacher-researcher will be a more cognitively empathetic instructor.

The fifth component of Cognitive Empathy, Metadigital learning awareness, is the most difficult to address in CPD in view of the lack of a solid body of research which can inform teacher training in this area. This is the domain in which, in my opinion being a self-reflective practitioner and an effective classroom-based researcher can be extremely useful. Hence, at this moment in time at least, CPD that attempts to address this metacomponent of Cognitive Empathy should focus less on making teachers conversant with relevant research and more on enhancing their reflective and research skills.

In conclusion, this article advocates the need for CPD in MFL teaching to focus much more than it currently does on the development of Cognitive Empathy. I have argued that simply training teachers in the deployment of AFL and differentiation strategies may not be sufficient. Moreover, using baseline testing may form assumptions about students that are skewed and not very useful when the teachers do not possess the specialised knowledge necessary to effectively interpret psychological test scores. The approach I advocate in my model of CE is laborious and relative expensive in terms of training, but CE being central to effective teaching and learning, it may be worth the effort and the cost.

In over 25 years of secondary school and university teaching career and more than that as a foreign language learner, the best teachers and educational managers I have come across were those who exhibited high levels of emotional and cognitive empathy. An old friend of mine once said that the worst line manager an MFL head of department can have is one who has never learnt a foreign language ; what he was actually referring to, indirectly, was to someone with low levels of cognitive empathy (how can you truly understand a foreign language student or teacher when you have never been through the process of learning a foreign language ?).

One the most important reasons why high levels of teacher cognitive empathy correlate with effective learning refers to student motivation. There is often a mismatch between how teachers expect students’ cognition to work and the way it actually does. In a survey I carried out with 150 of my students (the results of which I will publish in a future post), the activities that most impacted their motivation were those they did not feel they were ‘linguistically’ ready for. In second place they put listening tasks where speakers ‘go’ too fast. In third place doing long writing tasks in lessons. Another one of their pet hates was corrections they did not understand. All of these motivation inhibitors refer to low levels of cognitive empathy.

Another example of teacher-student cognitive mismatch refers to a widely used App: Padlet. Padlet is often praised by ‘ed tech’ MFL educators because it allows students to see what their class mates write on the wall, thereby promoting learning from that input. This presumes that all or most learners actively process their fellow students’ output and internalize it – which, even as a highly motivated and gifted language learner I am not sure I would have done in my teen-age years. So I put this assumption to the test. I asked students from four of my classes, immediately after creating a padlet wall to which all of them had contributed to note down in their books or iPads three language items they found in their classmates’ writing which they found interesting or useful. Two weeks later I asked them to recall the items they had noted down. Guess what ? Only two of the 68 students involved in this experiment actually remembered something (one item each).

Finallly, CE can be enhanced by attempting to learn a new language every so often. A great Cognittive empathy enhancement CPD activity which I was involved in as a PGCE trainee was to attend three Swahili classes. It was a much needed reminder of how hard it is to learn a language. To this day, whenever I teach a less able group, I cast my mind back to those three sessions and this helps me approach that group with more humility, patience and understanding.

Eight must do’s of MFL project-based learning

June 26, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

Those who have read my previous blogs will know that my espoused methodological approach to MFL instruction is situated in the Skill-building paradigm and is a combination of CLT and Focus on forms (not ‘form’). However, I have indeed tried out Project Based Learning on a number of occasions in the past, with varying success. Although I see serious advantages to this pedagogical approach there are serious threats to its effectiveness, which are partly intrinsic to the nature of the tasks set and partly to the way they are implemented by the teachers and managed by the learners.

The following are, in my opinion, the 8 most important steps to take in the implementation of Project Base Learning in order to control for such threats and enhance its learning impact on L2 learner proficiency. In what follows, I will only focus on pedagogical recommendations which relate to the specifics of target language acquisition I will not concern myself with other aspects of the planning of PBL, which pertain to the realm of metacognition, collaboration, enquiry and other generic skills.

1. Make sure that you decide on a core set of target language items and plan carefully for their recycling

One of the dangers of project-based learning (henceforth PBL) is the relative lack of control the teacher has over the language the students will process receptively and produce. Whilst one might see it as an advantage, as the students are being creative with the language, there are two problems with this. Firstly, a learner needs to process any given lexical items several times (somewhere between five and ten times) in order to learn it. Secondly, if we are to test the learners fairly at some point to assess how much has been learnt in the process, the students must have been exposed to a common core of vocabulary and grammar structures.

Insufficient recycling of language is the most common and serious pitfall of PBL. Students will not learn much. I used to have a colleague long ago whose students became very creative indeed in terms of graphics, photography, filming and use of digital media. However, their retention of anything they had written in the process was very poor. Had my colleague found ways to recycle at least a core set of vocabulary and grammar structures she would have obtained a great artefact whilst enhancing her students’ target language vocabulary and structural repertoire.

At the very outset of the project, on communicating to the students the project brief, teachers should be clear about the linguistic goals of the projects. Obviously, it is crucial to set realistic linguistic goals for the learners, as in PBL it is not rare to see students work at linguistic levels which are way beyond their current level of language competence.

Plan for the integration of ALL 4 macro-skills and embed grammar and communicative functions

This point refers to another potential issue with PBL, the fact, that is, that often the medium one chooses for the project kind of drives the way the students process the language. Hence, if one decides to produce a movie to answer the big question that the project is meant to address, the students involved may simply focusing on writing a script and reading it aloud. However, as language teachers, we have the ethical imperative to forge a balanced linguist who is versed fairly equally in all four skills. Hence, teachers need to plan carefully for the integration of all four skills in the project.

As I have already pointed out in a past blog on digital learning, speaking and listening are indeed the two areas of linguistic competence that are usually neglected the most. Curriculum designers and teachers working in the PBL paradigm need to ensure that these two important macro-skills are not neglected in the process.

Minimize ‘digital manipulation’ in the actual lesson

As I have already discussed extensively in previous posts (e.g. “Six useless things foreign language teachers do”), excessive ‘digital manipulation’ which occurs concurrently with language processing is likely to cause divided attention and will, consequently, impede learning. This is particularly the case with pre-intermediate to lower-intermediate learners. This phenomenon is due to the limited channel capacity of learners’ Working Memory who cannot attend simultaneously to various cognitively challenging tasks. Most ‘digital manipulation’ (e.g. App smashing) ought to be done by students outside lesson time, unless the presence of the teacher is absolutely necessary and the disruption to learning is deemed to be ‘minimal’.

Emphasize language acquisition as the main goal of the project

The concern for the attainment of a well-manufactured finished product that PBL often – but not always – entails does on many occasions hijack the focus of the lesson away from the ultimate goal of MFL teaching, which is target language acquisition. This needs to be in the teachers and students’ focal awareness throughout the process, and tactics must be implemented to verify that each lesson is actually enhancing learner target language proficiency; hence, formative assessment must permeate the whole process and summative assessment needs to be implemented, too, at key moments. After all, PBL should be about the language and skills that are learnt in the process of carrying out the project, not about the final product.

Make sure everyone in the group contributes

When PBL is carried out in groups some students often complain, at the end of the project, that not everyone contributed equally. It may be useful to require the students to keep a journal in which they must, at the end of each lesson, log in, in as much detail as possible, the extent of their contributions to the team’s effort. In my experience this is an effective way to scaffold fair and effective collaboration, especially if the journal is taken into account in the final evaluation.

Control for unethical behavior

In this day and age, a lot of PBL will be conducted using the Internet. This increases the risk of plagiarism and online-translator use. At the outset of my past PBL experiences, I asked my students to sign an ‘agreement’ in which they pledged never to use online translator nor plagiarize any source during the project. Believe it or not, this symbolic act does usually pay off.

Ensure the language assessment is valid and fair

For a test to be valid and fair, it must test students on what they have been taught. Hence, if we are teaching students through PBL, we need to be careful about how we test them at the end of the process. To simply assess them through the finished product is not valid, as the finished product does not tell us anything about how the process has enhanced their target language proficiency and about what they have retained. Nor can we test our students using traditional tests (e.g. the ones found in textbooks’ assessment packs), unless we have taught them through tasks similar to the ones used to test them. I have had colleagues in the past, who would do a project with their students on the same topic that the other instructors were teaching through different approaches whilst knowing that the end-of-unit test they would be sitting would have been based on the assessments found in the textbook-in-use (e.g. Expo, Tricolore, etc.). Not surprisingly, their students did not perform well.

Provide clear guidelines as to how the project is going to be assessed

I put this last, as I believe this is obvious. However, a colleague of mine advised me to add this in as, in her opinion, this does not always happen. At the very outset of the project the students ought to be told how they are going to be assessed and should be talked through any rubrics or other evaluative procedures used to feedback on the final product. In my experience, the students should be reminded several times along the way of the criteria that will be used in the assessment in order to scaffold good quality and collaboration.

Six ‘useless’ things foreign language teachers do

June 25, 2015October 9, 2025 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Grammar teaching, Metacognition, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

Recasts

Recasts are the most frequent form of feedback that teachers give students in the course of oral interactions. They consists of utterances by the teacher that repeat the student’s erroneous utterance but ‘fix’ the mistake(s) without changing the meaning in any way. Example:

Student: hier j’ai allé au cinéma

Teacher: je suis allé au cinéma

Recasts, according to research (e.g. Doughty, 1994) are extensively used in the classroom representing up to 60 or even 70 % of all teacher feedback on oral performance. An interesting finding by Doughty is that recasts tend to concern themselves with minor errors rather than big problems.

As several studies have clearly shown, recasts do not really ‘work’ as they are not noticed most of the time. Havranek (1999) investigated to what extent learners recall corrective feedback from the teacher or their own or their peers’ mistakes. She found that less than one third of the learners who were corrected remembered having been corrected; peers did not pay attention to the correction of others and, most importantly, whether the corrections were recalled or not made little difference to whether the errors were or were not committed later.

The main reason why recasts do not work is that when the learners’ Working Memory is interrupted in the middle of speech production by the correction, it will not rehearse that correction for the time necessary to commit it to long-term memory -because it will be concentrating on resuming the interrupted conversation flow. Hence, the content of the correction will often be lost – which explains why Havranek’ subjects did not recall more than two thirds of the correction.

In view of the little surrender value of recasts in terms of acquisition, interrupting the students to correct them whilst they are talking may do more harm than good. Not only it may have a negative cognitive impact by disrupting their prospective memory; but it may also affect their self-esteem, especially if the correction relates to minor errors – as Doughty’s study found.

The above are valid reasons not to engage in recasts. It may be more productive and less threatening for the learners if teachers made a mental note of the mistakes noticed and treat them later on in contexts in which the learner’s attentional resources can be more productively channelled.

Direct and Indirect error correction of written errors

Direct correction, whereby the teacher corrects an erroneous grammatical form and provides the correct version of that structure with an explanation on margin is pretty much a waste of valuable teacher time. Why? Tons of research (e.g. Cohen and Cavalcanti, 1990; Truscott,1996; Conti, 2001 and 2004) have demonstrated that most students do not process the correction in a way that is conducive to learning; most of them simply look at the mark, quickly read the comment and put the essay away, never to look at it again. Unless, as I argued in my post “Why teacher should not bother correcting errors in their students’ writing”, teachers engage students in more productive ways of processing teacher feedback, Direct correction is not going to enhance L2 acquisition. Error correction can be valuable when it places the errors into the students’ focal awareness, engages them in deep processing of teacher corrections, generates their intentionality to eradicate error and keeps it up for a sufficiently long period of time for any remedial learning to occur.

Indirect correction, on the other hand, is not likely to contribute much to acquisition as the learner will not be able to correct what s/he does not know (e.g. I cannot self-correct an omission of the subjunctive if I have not learnt it) and if s/he is indeed able to correct, s/he will not really learn much from it. To learn more about my views on this issue read my blog “Why asking students to self-correct their errors is a waste of time”.

One-off learning-to-learn sessions

Not long ago I came across a beautiful Power Point on a teaching-resources website which purported to train students in effective approaches to the memorisation of vocabulary. It contained numerous slides packed with interesting suggestions on how to best commit vocabulary to memory and lasted long enough to cover a whole lesson. In the past, I myself produced similar Power Points and delivered one-off sessions on learning strategies which the students usually found quite interesting and engaging. But did they actually learn from them?

The problem is that, unless there are several follow-up sessions and some form of scaffolding reminding the students to use the strategies that the Power Point presented, thirty years of research (see Macaro, 2007) clearly show that this approach does little more than raising learner awareness of the existence of these strategies, but will not result in learner uptake, i.e. very few if any learner will incorporate these strategies in their active repertoire of learning strategies.

For any learner training to be successful it must involve learners in extensive practice of the target strategies.

Identifying students’ learning styles and planning lessons accordingly

Research has clearly shown that learning styles and multiple intelligences are invalid constructs totally unsupported by theory and research. Moreover, there is not a single shred of evidence to show that teaching students based on their alleged learning style actually enhances their learning. Teachers should not waste valuable teaching time administering questionnaires or other ‘tests’ in an attempt to identify students’ learning style or ‘dominant intelligence(s)’. Most importantly, they should not bother planning lessons or remedial learning programs based on the findings obtained.

In view of the invalidity of these constructs, labelling students as visual, kinesthetic or other may lead them, especially the younger ones, to form a self-fulfilling prophecy that may ultimately be detrimental to their learning.

Asking pre-intermediate/lower intermediate learners to peer assess oral performance

Although it has some (modest) surrender value in terms of metacognitive enhancement, the practice of involving fairly inexperienced learners in peer assessment is not justified by the learning gains it produces, especially in terms of language acquisition. Firstly, as these learners do not usually possess enough declarative knowledge of the language to be able to assess and feedback on language use in a way that can significantly benefit the recipient of the feedback; secondly, and more importantly, they do not possess sufficient levels of procedural knowledge to be able to apply any declarative knowledge they have whilst processing what they hear their classmates say – which means they cannot effectively evaluate their oral output.

In fact, even with more proficient learners peer assessment practice may not always be beneficial. In a little experiment I made last year, I got 16 students that I had practised peer assessment with almost on a daily basis to assess their classmates after a typical IGCSE conversation, using the CIE evaluation rubrics. When I compared their assessment scores to mine the discrepancies were huge, most of them having been on average 25 % more generous than me in allocating marks.

Asking students to create digital artefacts in class

As I wrote in my blogs ‘Five central psychological challenges of foreign language learning’ and ‘Of SAMR and Samritans”, creating a digital artefact in class is not likely to be conducive to language acquisition enhancement at pre-intermediate to intermediate levels of L2 proficiency. The main reason is that human cognitive resources being finite, the working memory of an intermediate/lower intermediate MFL learner will not usually be able to process language effectively and efficiently whilst concurrently focusing on the operations he/she will be performing, e.g. cutting, pasting, ‘googling’ pictures, videoing, recording, ‘smashing’ Apps, etc.

Hence, forgetting by divided attention often occurs with not much learning at all taking place. I will never forget a group of Year 6 students telling me, after being involved for 5 weeks in making an iMovie about the topic ‘Ma maison’ in class, that all they remembered was the French for the rooms in the house.

Students, when involved in such activities should not do any ‘digital manipulation’ in lessons, unless we believe that this is very likely to enhance their target language proficiency. Classroom time should be devoted to learning the target language.

You can find out more about my approach to language teaching and learning in the book I co-authored with Steve Smith: “Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen” available for purchase here

IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT MORE, DO ATTEND MY ONLINE COURSES ORGANIZED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF BATH SPA, HERE: http://www.networkforlearning.org.uk

Five central psychological challenges facing effective mobile learning

June 22, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Technology and L2 learning, Uncategorized

A while ago, a very good friend and former colleague of mine, Fiona Seymour, popped around my classroom to have a chat with a group of year 8 students about how they felt the use of the iPad had impacted their learning since its adoption in our school. Some interesting facts emerged from the discussion which referred to some cognitive and metacognitive challenges that learners face when using the iPad or any other mobile device for learning.

Interestingly, in a very informative article that Fiona shared with me a few months later, two Scottish researchers from The University of West Scotland, Dr. Melody Terras and Dr Judith Ramsay address the very same challenges that my students mentioned, recommending that education providers take them into account when adopting mobile learning as the main or one of the main modes of delivery of the curriculum.

As a fan and assiduous user of mobile technology in the classroom I found this article a true ‘eye-opener’ as it not only confirmed some of the concerns I had about mobile learning but also triggered an ongoing process of reflection on their possible implications for teaching and on what I could do in my daily practice to address those concerns.

I believe than at an exciting time where ICT integration in the classroom is a reality in most developed countries every educator must be aware of these psychological challenges and endeavour to address them consistently and systematically in their teaching.

The five psychological challenges

Terras and Ramsay (2012) (at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01362.x/abstract ) identify the following crucial challenges of mobile learning:

The context-dependent nature of memory

As I have already discussed in a previous blog (“Words in the mind – how vocabulary is stored and organized in the brain”), memory is context-dependent. In other words, the context in which we create a memory will enhance our chances to recall that memory later. Thus, for instance, if I am learning a set of new vocabulary in my classroom, whilst sitting next to my friend Joe and facing my teacher, who is wearing a bright red flowery shirt, the classroom, my friend Joe, my teacher and her shirt will enhance my chances to recall that vocabulary in the future. Memory is also state-dependent. In other words, individuals are more likely to effectively recall a memory when he/she in the same emotional, motivational or physiological state in which he/she was when he/she encoded that memory.

As Terras and Ramsay point out, research shows that the retrieval of recently learnt material is highly affected by the influence of context. These findings have huge implications for mobile learning, as mobility, the fact that the learner may be using the iPad or phone to study in different environments, may disrupt the support of the context as a cue for retrieval of the target information. Thus, for instance, a student who used the iPad to learn new vocabulary for a test in his room, may then be revising it in the car or school bus on the way to school,then, once in school, may be going through it again in the library or in the canteen; each change of environment being different, the context-related retrieval cues will be missing, with a possible negative impact on recall.

Hence, the main learning-enhancement advantage of mobile devices, i.e. the fact that one can carry them with oneself wherever one likes, has the potential to disrupt learning. What can teachers do to address this issue? Terras and Ramsay do not make any pedagogical suggestions. My take on this is that, like one should do with any learning tool, teachers have the ethical imperative to forge healthy learning habits; this entails (a) raising learner awareness of this issue and of how it can affect learning and (b) modelling effective memory strategies which may effectively compensate for the lack of context-based cues; for example, students may be taught that, on learning new vocabulary whilst reading a French text on the iPad, they can creatively associate them with images and L1 words through the so-called ‘Keyword technique’, index cards and other menmonics or by using Apps like ‘Poplet’ or ‘Padlet’ to store and organize it semantically during or after reading the text. The association created through these two approaches would function as powerful retrieval cues at recall.

Human resources are finite

As I have often reiterated in my posts, one of the greatest ‘enemies’ of learning, if not the greatest, is divided attention caused by cognitive overload on Working Memory (e.g. processing inefficiency) or interference (e.g. being distracted by an another stimulus whilst trying to learn). As many of my students have pointed out over the years, mobile devices can generate a lot of distraction, mainly coming from notifications from Facebook, Instagram and e-mail. Terras and Ramsay report a study by Cicso investigating the ability of social media to distract students. The study revealed that UK students are ‘most distracted by social media’. Another sort of distraction that Terras and Ramsay do not consider, but that I notice day in day out in my school and surrounding areas, is that mobile devices allow for students to study whilst socializing (e.g. they sit around in groups each working on their iPad). This was less likely to happen with PCs and laptops. In sum, as Terras and Ramsay (2012: 824) advocate,

Mobile learners may need to be more skilled at inhibiting responses to extraneous stimuli. In particular, they may need to develop superior attentional control in order to be effective learners in environment that are not primarily designed for learning. Noisy and changing environments and the potential distractions posed by social media may place significant additional demands upon the learner’s auditory and visual attention.

As they also point out, one important harm that interruption causes to learning occurs at the level of prospective memory. Prospective memory supports the intended execution of future tasks and may be time-based (e.g. remembering to check an essay once more first thing in the morning the next day before handing it) or event-based (e.g. remembering to arrange ideas in a logical sequence when planning an essay). Disruption seems to have a particularly harmful effect on prospective rather than retrospective memory, especially on the stages of prospective memory involving execution and evaluation.

Divided attention can stem from the environment but also from the mobile medium itself. As Terras and Ramsay point out, research evidences that face-to-face communication always outshines mediated communication as the latter is usually less rich and more ambiguous. Mobile devices, websites and apps pose more cognitive challenges, especially for less able and flexible learners who may experience processing overload whilst accessing and/or manipulating it.

Another important harmful effect was highlighted by myself in a previous post on the SAMR model (“Of SAMR and Samritans…”) and refers to another powerful source of divided attention: the cognitive load posed on Working Memory by the ‘mechanics’ involved in the creation of a digital artifact. Often teachers involve students in tasks which require them to operate simultaneously on two levels: on the one hand they are required to generate, elaborate and organize ideas related to a given task’s brief, on the other they are required to convey the resulting intellectual product of that process through digital media (e.g. smashing apps). If teachers are not careful, the demands posed by such modus operandi can easily cause cognitive overload and impede learning.

Sources of cognitive overload must be anticipated and addressed in the planning of any activity in which digital media are integrated with MFL learning.

Distributed cognition and situated learning

By this, Terras and Ramsay refer to the new phenomenon created by the Web, whereby learning contexts which in the past where very distant from one another are becoming increasingly interconnected via mobile social networking. Thus, mobile learners construct their comprehension of the world and knowledge through cognitive interaction with a much greater and more culturally diverse range of contextual sources of information than non-mobile learners. This has obviously the potential to greatly enhance learning. However, the challenge resides in the fact that not all individuals, nor all external input, will be of value for the learning process. Hence, mobile learners need to be ‘taught’ how to discern who and what on the web is relevant to their learning and reliable as a source. As Terras and Ramsay put it:

Learners will have to cope with an extra layer of complexity in their learning ecology: mobile social learning increases the density of the distributed cognitive network. So, although learners may benefit from this increase in the distributed and situated nature of their cognitive ecology, the challenge is to use their digital literacy skills in addition to more generic cognitive skills in order to screen out redundant or irrelevant input to their learning

Education providers, in my opinion, need to invest much more than they usually do in structured learner training programs aimed at raising learner awareness of this challenge, whilst modelling effective approaches to a safe, discerning and cognitive-/time-efficient use of web sources. Such programs should be implemented, in my view, concurrently and as extensively and intensively as digital literacy programs are – which, as research suggest, rarely happens.

In the MFL classroom this is an important issue across several dimensions of learning. Firstly, mobile MFL learners are more likely to be tempted to use online translators and must be warned about the dangers of their use. Secondly, they need to become more discerning as to the cultural or political bias of the target language sources they interact with. Thirdly, they must be able to grasp the differences in terms of register, between different types of text genres (e.g. how writing a facebook feed differs from writing a blog or journal article). Fourthly, plagiarism is highly encouraged by the mobile social networking culture where information is recycled at high speed with little regard for intellectual property.

Metacognition is essential for mobile learning

This is undoubtedly the most important challenge. Mobile learners must possess the ‘psychological infrastructure, as Terras and Ramsay put it, to support mobile learning. In other words, they need to develop metacognitive skills to be able to cope with all the above mentioned challenges. They need to develop strategies in order to best prevent the already discussed sources of cognitive load and external distractions from interfering with their learning and to generally effectively self-manage the learning process; this is particularly important if we aim to develop truly competent autonomous learners. The development of mobile learners’ web-related metacognitive competence should start concurrently with the very early stages of mobile learning.

Individual differences matter

Although Terras and Ramsay consider this as a different point to the previous one, I believe the two are very closely related. What the authors mean here is that students need to understand how technology best suits their personality, age, gender, learning preferences, personal set of skills, aptitudes and attitudes. Teachers often take it for granted that mobile learners, simply because (in their daily life) spend hours on mobile devices will know how to use them for learning. Being able to use mobile apps, social and learning platforms in a way that best suits one’s own personality attributes, skills and academic goals is not easy – it is a complex skill to acquire. How many teachers, I wonder, have the know-how to effectively impart on their mobile learners training in this kind of competence? This implies that professional development in this area ought to be focused on by education providers so as to equip teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills to address this crucial aspect of learners’ metacognition.

I would add a sixth psychological challenge to the five that Terras and Ramsay have identified: Depth of processing. Young mobile learners are exposed in the social media (e.g Facebook and Twitter) to an overload of information, much of which is ‘fast’, ‘sloganised’ (forgive my ‘neologism’, here) and tend to be ‘sensationalistic’ and ‘eye-catching’ in nature. This ‘high-impact’ / ‘high speed’ culture has created a mindset amongst youngsters which encourages a superficial approach to information and cognition. This mindset, in my view, engenders shallow processing and the skin-deep acquisition of facts and notions unsupported by substance and/or reliable and referenced evidence. The challenge is for teachers to engage students, through mobile learning, in deeper processing of facts, notions and ideas. It is no easy challenge in a fast-paced society like ours, where the digital world creates on a daily basis such a wide and divergent pool of information and entertainment opportunities. We need to always bear in mind, as educators, that it is depth of processing that, after all, creates effective learning.

In conclusion, mobile learning has an enormous potential for the enhancement of MFL learning and of learning in general. This potential, however, has to be effectively harnessed and channelled. Education providers have to be aware of the 5 challenges pointed out by Terras and Ramsay as they are central to the construction of our learners’ cognition and may affect learning. In a highly interconnected world where social networking dictates a fast-paced, scarcely regulated and rich flood of information, the 21st century mobile learners need to be trained effectively to become competent autonomous learners versed not just in digital literacy but, more importantly, in generic life-long skills which enable them to analyze, synthesise and evaluate judiciously, productively and safely the masses of information available online.