Image: Courtesy of Jenifer Ho
Tuesday 12th of July 2016, 5:00-6:30 pm
Online language learning platforms are now highly popular. With significant parts of these platforms being available for free to anyone with Internet access they have considerable impact on foreign language learning. In this session I will present a multimodal approach (Kress, 2010) to research how two learners of Chinese remember the form, meaning, and pronunciation of Chinese characters in two online language learning platforms: Memrise and ChinesePod. Through screen recordings and interviews the study documents two types of learning practices of 12 participants over a period of 4 weeks. By adopting a multimodal approach to data collection and analysis, I illustrate how learners use translanguaging as a process to help scaffold their learning. While a lot of studies in translanguaging focus on linguistic practices in multilingual classrooms, only a number of them examine translanguaging in written form in online contexts, therefore there is a need for the use of new research methodologies to research this kind of new environment. This study aims to open a new venue for research and challenge existing understanding on language learning.
About the speaker
Jenifer Ho is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at the UCL Institute of Education.
The Visual and Multimodal Research Forum 