Mobile Language Learning: The Medium is ^not the Message

Abstract

This paper repositions McLuhan's (1964/1965) extension theory of technology in the context of mobile (-assisted) language learning (MALL), and explores whether and how the medium (i.e., the mobile device) impacts the message (i.e., the target language) and the means by which it is taught in MALL. A survey of recommended commercial MALL apps generated four top-ranked apps, which were reviewed, then trialed in an autoethnographic study of learning Italian to explore how language, communication, and language pedagogy were theorized, enacted, and assessed in each app. On the whole, MALL apps were found to repackage outdated language teaching pedagogies, and failed to capitalize on the affordances of mobile connection apart from piecemeal incorporation of gamification strategies and social media links. The article concludes with a call for professional educators to harness, not just consume, mobile technologies towards informed design-oriented MALL pedagogies. _______________ In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium-that is, of any extension of ourselves-result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (McLuhan, 1964/1965, p. 7) McLuhan's vision of electronic media extending the individual into a technologically-mediated world was next to incomprehensible in the 1960s; today it is inescapable. In McLuhan's day, technologies extending the self were electric unidirectional mass media vehicles, such as the television, planted in a family room for social viewing. Contemporary technologies have evolved out of all recognition from McLuhan's time into mobile multifunction interactive devices, clustered on the individual. In today's world, the technological extensions through which we experience and participate in life are no longer something we can simply pull the plug on. We are all but ubiquitously connected to a parallel digital universe, the portal to which we hold in mobile devices tucked into purses and pockets. Technological strides have resulted in powerful, portable computers that are woven into daily communication. Dynamic, interactive, multimodal literacies have evolved in the multimedia petrie dish of this new environment, and the Industrial era consumer of literate materials has in tandem morphed into an Information era produser (Bruns & Schmidt, 2011, p. 4), who is continuously collaboratively building and shaping Internet content. Increasingly, literate produsing is mobile. This article repositions McLuhan's (1964/1965) extension theory of technology in the context of mobile (-assisted) language learning (MALL), which is a specific application of mobile