Mobile assisted language learning of less commonly taught languages: learning in an incidental and situated way through an app

Abstract

Learning has been moving out of classrooms into virtual and physical spaces for over a decade now (Naismith, Lonsdale, Vavoula, & Sharples, 2004). It is becoming mobile ‘in space’, i.e. carried across various domains (workplace, home, places of leisure), ‘in time’, as it encompasses different moments of the day, and in terms of ‘learning purpose’, which may be related to work, self-improvement or leisure (Vavoula & Sharples, 2002). In line with the principles of learning in an informal, incidental and mobile way, an open source and geolocalised application for learning foreign languages with a smartphone is being implemented within Key Action 2 of the Erasmus Plus European framework by the project called ILOCALAPP - Incidentally Learning Other Cultures and Languages – (Ceccherelli et al., 2016). ILOCALAPP will result in an app to aid in learning Finnish, Italian, Polish and Portuguese embedded within their respective cultural practices. The target group is mobility students, so the app will be situated in the university city where international students arrive, i.e. the Finnish language content will unfold in Rovaniemi, Italian in Bologna, Polish in Poznań, and Portuguese in Coimbra. The learning content will blend in the students’ everyday contexts, whereby the app would be used incidentally in a game-like manner, thus providing enjoyable learning moments throughout their daily activities in an informal way.