Motivating Language Learners Could Be Served by Social Media, to an Extent Simultaneously, As Evidenced by the Cases

Social Media to Motivate Language Learners From Before Admission to After Graduation

Steve McCarty

Professor, Osaka Jogakuin College and Osaka Jogakuin University 2-26-54 Tamatsukuri, Chuo-ku, Osaka 540-0004 JAPAN [email protected]

Introduction

This chapter presents a cluster of pedagogical initiatives where the author utilized Internet social media to reach language learners in Japan from secondary school to after college graduation. Taking the 2008-2009 academic year as a cross-section, possibly in a trend, the five cases detailed in this chapter focus on utilizing social media to motivate language learners. Several more initiatives mainly for community outreach are mentioned, some involving online technologies, to show the scope of contemporary practices.

The demographic and sociocultural context of English education in Pacific Asia is first examined. Community outreach in this context is defined, positing that such activities arise from both institutional imperatives and voluntary pedagogical aims. Technological affordances suited to the purposes of motivating learners and community outreach, particularly social media such as social networking sites, are also introduced. Previous findings in utilizing social media with students provide further support for the efficacy of such initiatives. After thus presenting a conceptual framework for utilizing social media educationally, the cluster of pedagogical initiatives can then be described, and their significance considered. The conclusion will discuss implications of the cases and numerous instances of community outreach, revisiting principles motivating the initiatives.

The aim of the voluntary initiatives was particularly to enhance the integrative motivation of language learners towards the community of L2 users. Gardner reformulates his seminal concept after decades as follows:

[I]n the socio-educational model of second language acquisition, integrative motivation is a complex of attitudinal, goal-directed, and motivational attributes.

Original source (book chapter reproduced with editor’s permission): McCarty, S. (2010). Social media to motivate language learners from before admission to after graduation. In W. M. Chan et al. (Eds.), Media in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 87-105). National University of Singapore, Centre for Language Studies.

That is, the integratively motivated individual is one who is motivated to learn the second language, has a desire or willingness to identify with the other language community, and tends to evaluate the learning situation positively. (n.d.)

Related concepts include instrumental motivation, also in socio-educational terms, where L2 learning serves practical purposes such as career advancement, and success can mean becoming bilingual but not necessarily bicultural. For the purposes of this chapter’s focus, extrinsic and intrinsic are regarded in their psychological dimension, according to whether the impetus for action comes primarily from without or within. Whereas a learner with an integrative orientation (cf. Dörnyei, 2001, p. 16) may gradually become bicultural as well as bilingual insofar as permitted in the social milieu between two language groups. The integrative learner imagines a community of target language speakers and wishes to be part of that world.

In this view, whether or not the teacher is a significant other to the student may correlate with possibilities for transformative learning. Motivation has often been studied in terms of personal attributes, which tend to be reified into personality traits that mitigate against change (Lamb, 2007, pp. 757-760). Whereas if the pedagogy is changed, student motivation is also subject to transformation. In that sense, it is possible to enhance integrative motivation through interactions that, even if brief and quantitatively small in terms of L2 exposure, have a profound impact on learners as persons. Interactions of transformative quality can have many possible characteristics, for example, authentic and collaborative relationships that move the learner and remove unnecessary social barriers, or interactions that draw upon the fascination and empowerment possible with new technologies.

Social media comprise a new area of great interest to educators first of all because learners can be reached there. Yet educational applications of these rapidly-changing suites of software, limited mostly by time and imagination, await many more pedagogical initiatives and cross-cultural studies. Short of systematizing all the new possibilities, this chapter aims to be suggestive of future directions for experimentation and enquiry. For practitioners, however, a key innovation of such initiatives with social media will be tentatively identified as expanding in myriad possible ways the educative radius of action in the dimensions of time, space, and media of communication. Community outreach in the Pacific Asian sociocultural context

Community outreach, to this author, means pursuing, for a certain purpose, connections beyond the radius of given relationships in an institution, ostensibly for the mutual benefit of the group and those it potentially serves. For a foreign language educator who has moved to a Pacific Asian country, community outreach involves initiating intercultural communication with people other than students currently in one's classes, yet with a similar goal of motivating foreign language learners to participate in the target language community. While external pressures to community outreach increasingly emanate from institutional imperatives, the time and effort involved in striving to expand the radius of action through new media require an internal commitment.

Demographically, Asian societies are at various stages starting from a post-War abundance of young people seeking limited career opportunities through a competitive educational system. The gates were narrow at one time in Japan as well, with entrepreneurial or alternative paths even now rarely leading to successful careers. Earlier than the rest of Asia, however, the demographic trend in Japan reversed in the mid-1990s, with fewer children and high school seniors every year after that time, particularly for the hundreds of private colleges that were built when the economy and student numbers were both growing. All developed countries without substantial immigration, including emerging countries in Asia, face this demographic implosion or ageing society.

Japan continues to share many educational problems with the rest of Pacific Asia stemming from overheated competition, such as “truancy, bullying, and suicide” (HuRights Osaka, 2006). Schoolchildren often learn to learn for negative reasons, out of fear of the social consequences of not conforming to expectations, rather than out of their natural desire to learn. An editorial in The Japan Times provides a comprehensive interpretation of data indicating that violence in schools has reached an all-time high (“An education,” 2009).

Even though foreign language education has been equated with internationalization, test backwash and grammar-translation methods have not been conducive to interest in intercultural communication. The ubiquitous pressure on teachers to motivate students is a sign of defensive learners or the diminution of their intrinsic motivation to learn foreign languages along with other fields perceived as school subjects. Such a sociocultural context has given rise to an unquestioned assumption that Pacific Asian students approach foreign language learning solely out of instrumental motivation. That assumption will be challenged

by summarizing previous research and analyzing more recent pedagogical initiatives utilizing social media.

In terms of institutional culture, outreach is turning from desirable to imperative, and drawing college faculty members into community outreach activities. Private colleges struggling to reach enrolment quotas are responding most strenuously to the demographic trend by redoubling the outreach of staff and faculty members to regional secondary schools. There is a trend to outreach as early as possible toward potential students, both in terms of timing and the age of students targeted. Language teachers can align with the goals of outreach efforts by promoting bilingualism through a more positive view of English for International Communication. The search for the attention of potential students could also lead to the online social media where young people gather and look for information.

In the academic year ending in March of 2009, the author was engaged in many community outreach activities, requested by staff or taking the initiative, both face-to-face and with elements of social media. While this chapter focuses on community outreach for purposes wider than student recruitment, the author was also drawn into encounters with junior high school students, and was asked to write an article for a Website to attract high school students to Osaka colleges. Without claiming these events to be representative, the sudden increase may be a harbinger of the future for other practitioners as well.

Definition and Affordances of Social Media

The meaning and role of media can be approached from many disciplinary perspectives, from communication-related fields to performance studies and distance education, but rarely intersecting with foreign language education. Howard (2002) applies locus of control in performance studies to e-learning, and she agrees with McCarty (2009a) that collaborating with students to place their authentic foreign language performances online can enhance their integrative motivation.

For the purposes of this chapter, media are defined as infrastructural communication channels that are widely or mutually accessible contemporaneously. That is, a teacher could reach students during the same semester multidimensionally, for instance face-to-face, through mobile phones, and through various forms of computer-mediated communication such as social networking sites. In contrast, the focus is commonly on the technologies such as social

software, in this chapter they are viewed primarily as media, as defined above, and in terms of the purposes that social media serve, particularly in motivating L2 learners.

A Google definition search on the terms define:social media on October 13, 2008 yielded five results, two of relevance to this analysis, including a definition by Wikipedia, which is itself a characteristic example of social media:

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo. (Wikipedia, 2008)

Wikipedia distinguishes online social media from industrial media, also called mainstream or mass media. Furthermore, Wikipedia (2008) elaborates that social media can rival industrial media in the parameters of reach, accessibility, usability and recency. Few mainstream outlets have a greater global audience (reach), more frequent updates (recency), or ease and affordability of viewing and especially production of content (accessibility, usability) than social media.

However, such a technical definition does not capture the human elements that make social media so attractive, the social networking and individual empowerment. In the view of this author, social media benefit individuals, and possibly institutions, by widening their circle of contacts, and amplifying their communications, in terms of messages or created artifacts, to a wider audience than was hitherto possible.

Moreover, this chapter distinguishes between a wide definition such as Wikipedia’s – overlapping with Web-based technologies that include elements of social media, some of which continue from the 1990s – and a narrow definition that focuses on technologies utilized

primarily for social purposes. The Wikipedia entry provides a broad cross-section of the current technological terrain in which users pursue their aims, but a definition focusing more on social affordances is needed. Social media need to be distinguished from more common terms such as social software, and even from individual functions that are primarily social. For social media must bring together a suite of functions, serving a range of purposes, in order to generate virtual media that are convincingly social and thus seem worth pursuing to most people who have the opportunity.

The narrow definition preferred for this analysis is closer to the following succinct definition, although complex human social needs and aspirations are still subsumed under the guise of “users”:

social media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction. (Search Engine Watch, 2008)

Social networking sites (SNS) are most representative of social media, as their platforms of software functions most fully simulate social networks for users. Successful SNS include a large user community and many of the affordances listed in the Wikipedia definition. Common functions are blogs, messaging systems, forms for uploading and displaying images and videos; search engines for information and people in the SNS; feeds for observing updates by acquaintances or tracking visitors to one’s own site; community formation through topics of common interest or personal networks by invitation; profile templates, privacy and other settings. They are generally free, easy to use, and flexible in serving various purposes for individual users. There is a degree of meritocracy within as well as between sites. For the owners to become or remain successful, user-generated feedback, recommendations or criticisms need to be heeded, which in turn influence what kinds of functions, sites and media will be developed next. The virtual environment thus serves users more and more suitably by coming into closer accord with human nature and the local culture.

Among users of the Internet, through mobile phones as well as networked computers, social networking is the most widely utilized Web-based application, particularly among students in emerging and developed countries including much of Asia. Among social networking sites (SNS), Facebook, MySpace, Cyworld (South Korea), QQ (China), and Mixi (Japan) each has

tens if not hundreds of millions of users. Other Internet sites among the world’s most often visited, such as YouTube, include social media functions such as posting comments, forming topical groups or channels for common interests, tagging keywords, embedding code in blogs, and other forms of sharing.

In comparison with social networking sites, the functionality of YouTube brings people together more indirectly. Aspects of YouTube use such as addressivity or audience also make it to a great extent an implicit form of social media. The main purpose of posting most YouTube videos is ostensibly to show something symbolically in moving pictures and sound to a wider audience of people who mostly remain strangers, influenced by the celebrity power of movies, whereas the main purpose of SNS is to network with other individuals. But there are exceptions and areas an overlap in terms of sharing and communication in a broad sense. In a case of videoblogging presented later in this chapter, the videos were made with a specific communicative purpose for a study abroad program and were intended to reach a targeted audience of college stakeholders.

The exact features of social networking sites (SNS) can differ widely, reflecting their culture of origin. For example, some features of Mixi that are different from SNS elsewhere reinforce pre-existing Japanese patterns of social relations. The Mixi interface is only available in the Japanese language, and an invitation from an existing user has been necessary to join, conveying a sense of belonging to an exclusive club in a familiar culture. There are categories and questions in the self-introductory profile that correspond to Japanese lifestyles but would probably not occur to designers of SNS elsewhere. For more about the cultural significance of Mixi, its technological affordances and limitations, and the complex peer group dynamics encountered in reaching students beyond classes in this way, see McCarty (2009b). The following sections will also refer to specific uses of Mixi from time to time.

Utilizing Social Media to Motivate Language Learners

While this chapter is mostly descriptive, aiming to develop perspectives on pedagogical practices that have become possible, some methodological considerations and background information may help to place these issues in context. Crosta & Prieto (2009) investigated what constitutes innovation in distance education courses, employing quantitative methods apparently at the expense of pedagogical criteria. However, they usefully distinguish innovations from results, and their definition of innovation combines technological and

sociological breakthroughs with improved services to e-learning users (Crosta & Prieto, 2009, pp. 1-2). On the other hand, in a study that focuses on social networking sites (SNS) for foreign language learning, Harrison & Thomas (2009, p. 115) find support that ethnomethodology is suitable to investigate SNS. Thus there may be a need for qualitative approaches to pedagogical issues as well. The author similarly had to interact with students according to Japanese cultural contours and social protocols of the Mixi SNS in order to investigate how to reach and motivate students in that new dimension (McCarty, 2009b).

While this chapter focuses on cases utilizing social media since 2008, some background from previous investigations may help to place the new technologies and practices in perspective. The content-based EFL curriculum at Osaka Jogakuin College (OJC) involves teaching topic discussion, reading, writing, and some other subjects in English, yet incoming students cannot be assumed to have the requisite listening comprehension skills for such immersive classes. Thus, since the entrance ceremony in early 2004, OJC became the first college in the world where all students received iPods. Moreover, the iPods were loaded with college-created listening files for the students to use before starting classes, and then for homework in certain classes. For more details along with the technology of podcasting, cf. McCarty (2005).

For each content-based EFL class the author teaches, the syllabus indicates the instructor’s e-mail address and a class Website or blog post of links for the class. When the author’s first or second year students of core courses have excelled in campus-wide contests, the author has recorded their peace dialogue or presentation as a podcast with the transcript linked for the sake of EFL students anywhere. This student-generated content (Lee & McLoughlin, 2007) has been designated an “effective practice” by the Sloan Consortium for online education (2008). Recognition from abroad confirms the global audience to the students and stands to enhance their integrative (Dörnyei, 2001, p. 16) motivation, which is potentially stronger than instrumental motivation (Norris-Holt, 2001). Instrumental motivation appears to predominate in Asia, but it is reasoned that for students to be active content creators in the target language community represents a positive transformation in perspective. Seeing that the instructor appreciates their work in English and gives extra time to placing it online, students tend to be motivated to reciprocate. This authentic collaboration sustains personal teacher-student relationships, which Dörnyei recommends to motivate students (2001, pp. 31-39).

The author’s Computer Communication class has been most suitable for a variety of Web 2.0 activities, some of which have been posted online. One was a narrated slide show where the

student introduced her home region through her voice and photos of the scenery. As with the podcasts, photos or other personal information identifying students are not shown, out of caution, but their voices are heard, and they still find it exciting. A voice comment posted to the online narrated slide show by an EFL educator in Europe was a pleasant surprise to one student, confirming the global audience and appreciation of her work in the target language community. Such experiences can be facilitated through online media or academic networks with the aim of enhancing integrative motivation.

In another instance in late 2007, the instructor collaborated with Computer Communication class students on a YouTube video about the Mixi social networking site. The students were genuine resources on the Japanese site and gave frank opinions about how teachers might be regarded in students’ social networks. “Social Networking in Japanese Student Territory with Mixi” can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXBwr6gMrrM. How the author approached several classes about Mixi and what it revealed about Japanese socioculture in new media is dealt with extensively in McCarty (2009b, pp. 189-199).

Having developed personal teacher-student relationships, as Dörnyei (2001, pp. 31-39) recommends, it is natural for both sides to wish to stay in touch after classes end or after graduation, and social networking technology makes it easy and convenient to do so. Until recently, contact with students could end abruptly after the current semester, and when students graduate they lose their campus e-mail, blog, and learning management system (LMS) accounts. But the teacher might wish to follow milestones in former students’ lives, for example whether or not they are applying the EFL skills they learned in college in the workplace or society. If the teacher and students become Mixi friends, for instance, the teacher can send out occasional messages of encouragement along with personal and professional milestones in blog posts with multimedia such as photos or YouTube videos embedded. Students would be reminded in the case of a foreign instructor that part of their world is this cross-cultural relationship where they can use English for authentic communication. A teacher could finally do longitudinal research with student subjects after they graduate. Various new possibilities are opened up for individuals and institutions to achieve continuity of interconnected relationships by the use of social media.

Such previous investigations have reinforced the author’s conviction that reaching learners beyond the classroom in collaborative relationships with online technologies could enhance their integrative motivation. Mixi was utilized for social networking with current college

students, former students, and future students, as will be seen. Students were also palpably delighted when their performances were placed online in the form of podcasts, narrated slide shows, or YouTube videos. A student was interviewed and spoke freely about her motivation, saying that “the audience creates good tension” and that “performances motivate me to master English,” whereas “[f]or school presentations English is more of a tool.” “When I see Japanese people speaking English fluently, for example with foreigners on the train, it is motivating, a kind of longing.” What she called “good tension” is productive pressure in pedagogical terms. English was a “tool” when graded and a “longing” towards the L2 target community. Thus the same student, with no international or exceptional background for Japan, exhibited both instrumental and integrative motivation (McCarty, 2009a, p. 74). There is no reason that other students throughout Pacific Asia should not have similar innate potential for integrative as well as instrumental motivation, both of which can be evoked by a favorable situation or pedagogical practice.

Cases Utilizing Social Media for Motivation and Community Outreach

Cases of utilizing social media during the 2008-2009 academic year to motivate language learners, and for community outreach as defined earlier, are next described and numbered for subsequent discussion. The focus of this section is on what has become possible in practice with social media, that is, to motivate language learners qualitatively if not measurably. As distinct from activities requested by college staff where the main purpose was community outreach, the following cases were of the author’s initiative in exploring new ways to enhance integrative motivation toward foreign language learning. There were elements of community outreach in most cases, which drew mainly from the affordances of social software and were ancillary to the purpose of motivating learners.

Social Media activities with Future Students

Case 1 – High School Students (February and September 2008): Two similar instances leveraged social media, specifically the SNS Mixi, to reach and encourage students before admission to the college. Mixi allows members, besides following site updates by their circle of friends, to freely join topical communities. There is a community for OJC as a whole with over 700 members, which the author joined to offer motivational encouragement. It may be objectionable to copy others’ posts from a password-protected members’ site, so the students’ messages are simply described as follows.

In February 2008 a message board thread was started in the OJC community in Mixi by a high school senior who was accepted by OJC for the school year beginning in April of 2008, asking if there were others like her in the community. She was clearly trying to get a head start on networking to make friends, and indeed there were at least 44 replies to her post. The author responded to her Japanese message but in English, welcoming her and encouraging incoming students. Then in September 2008, antedating a possible admission even further, another high school senior posted a message to the community saying that she was thinking of applying to the 2-year division of OJC for April 2009. She was not confident in her English achievement but was interested and willing to try. This time the author responded to the Japanese message again in English, expressing reassurance as well as encouragement of her efforts. Among the many emoticons that one can choose in Mixi, the author selected the animated image of an archer shooting an arrow to symbolize her striving toward that goal.

Social Media activities with Current College Students

Case 2 – Current College Students in one’s class (January 2009): The semester project for Computer Communication class students from late 2008 was to collaborate with the instructor on a YouTube video introducing the course itself. This helped to review the semester activities and consolidate their understanding of the various Web 2.0 technologies. That the students, who were not advanced by Japanese standards, surpassed themselves in speaking English shows their heightened motivation as well as the scaffolding provided by describing what they had done. The students amended the plan that was based on the scruples of personal information privacy by appearing in the video with their faces mostly covered by a handkerchief. “Osaka Jogakuin College Computer Communication Class” can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XN0KHWyKd8. It now seems so basic to make a video to introduce a class. EFL students do it in a foreign language, so it can be observed how the performance affects their English speaking and motivation. Taken online with YouTube it becomes an authentic project with a potentially global audience. In the future, many or all courses at educational institutions could be predicted to have some kind of online video introduction.

Case 3 – Students on campus and Former Students (from January 2009): In late 2008 Child Research Net (CRN) in Tokyo published a paper by the author on how various types of annual campus English contests motivated students to excel, linking the efficacy of

performances to integrative motivation. CRN, which publishes research on Japan mainly through English, Japanese, and Chinese Websites, was seeking voices of young Japanese who were uncommonly articulate in English writing. The student-generated content discussed in the author’s paper led to an exclusive offer from CRN to publish papers regularly by Osaka Jogakuin College students, edited by the author, for two years. In late 2008 the author started disseminating bilingual information about the offer particularly through campus blog posts and the teaching staff mailing list. Students receive a certificate, book coupons, and a tangible accomplishment in their major field of study. In January 2009 the first student paper was published (Wada, 2009), and it is relevant to the introductory discussion in this chapter on contemporary student problems in Pacific Asia. Several other manuscripts were published in 2009, including students who had already graduated by the time of publication, and one from a student of a colleague, as a wider range of topics and genres became possible with online dissemination and collaboration. The Child Research Net Young Researchers’ Papers site is at http://www.childresearch.net/PROJECT/YRP/.

Reaching a Former Student After Graduation with Social Media

Case 4 –Former Student after Graduation (from August 2008): In late 2007 the author interviewed a student for qualitative research on performances and motivation, but she had graduated by the time the interview data was compiled. Without knowing her new e-mail or any contact information, it was still possible to reach her in August of 2008 through the Mixi messaging system to confirm that the English data meant exactly what she had intended. The content-focused communication in English evidently drew the former student back into the target language community. She responded in part: “Asked by you, I consider again ‘why I study English’ carefully and slowly. That reminds me of my motivation.” In December of 2009 the author similarly contacted the former student to share the published research. “These days I don’t use English,” she responded. “But something motivates me to continue to study English. I think it never change my spirit to communicate with many people using English all over the world.” Her words demonstrate reinforced integrative motivation, while this case represents a new kind of post-teacher-student relationship, which has been extended for years through social media. The contact in this case is less important than the possibilities opened up, as such new communication channels could be used to reach graduates systematically for information exchange, L2 continuing education, or community outreach.

Reaching College Stakeholders from Abroad by Videoblogging

A final instance of utilizing social media for educational communication involved students currently enrolled, not in the author’s classes but studying abroad. The impetus for the experiment came mostly from other college stakeholders. They included parents above all and college staff concerned about how the students were faring abroad after only one school year at the college.

Case 5 – Current Students not in the author’s classes, their Families, Staff and other College Stakeholders (February-March 2009): The author accompanied 12 students at the end of their first year of college to New Zealand for a short-term study abroad program at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology. The idea of ‘vlogging abroad’ was that students’ enjoyable experiences and progress in English communication could be vividly conveyed from abroad to parents and other stakeholders at home while the latter parties were liable to worry rather than afterwards. Reports to the college office were expected in any case, so value was added by making multisensory reports available through a campus blog right after students’ key experiences.

Besides photos of the students, six videos were embedded in blog entries over the three weeks. The videos were edited in New Zealand and uploaded to the author’s YouTube channel in the U.S., then linked by their code to the password-protected English newsletter blog at Osaka Jogakuin College. The vlog entries, which are still available to the campus community, have drawn some comments, an interactive element of social media.

The videos recorded beautiful scenery, campus and classroom scenes, spontaneous conversations during excursions as well as students’ prepared speeches at the Sayonara Party, all in English. Each student was interviewed about her home stay in one video recorded on the go, which provided reassuring details about their important home stay experiences along with a demonstration of the students’ English speaking progress.

Conclusion

Social media and other online media were shown to provide a means to widen the radius of action to reach potential or future students, current students outside of class, former students still on campus, alumni, parents of students, colleagues, college staff, and other possible stakeholders in the institution. The cases of social media most fully illustrated some possible

ways that the educative radius of action could be expanded. The dimension of time was clearly expanded to reach learners from before admission to after graduation. In terms of space, online technologies opened up possibilities of distance education, reaching learners away from campus as well as on campus outside of regular classes. Geographically, the vlogging abroad project spanned New Zealand and Japan via U.S.-based technologies. In terms of the media dimension as defined earlier, multiple infrastructural channels of communication were utilized to reach learners. It stands to reason that reaching learners multidimensionally would reinforce the effectiveness of pedagogical approaches. At the same time, expanding the radius of action into new spheres in various ways agreeable to learners could widen the range of possibilities for enhancing motivation, sustaining relationships, fostering L2 communication and learning.

Purposes of both community outreach and motivating language learners could be served by social media, to an extent simultaneously, as evidenced by the cases. Palpably positive student responses in observed demeanor and action reinforced the principles argued in this chapter and the motivation of the author to continue such initiatives. Chief among those principles are that integrative motivation is an innate human capacity, more potentially transformative than instrumental motivation, and can be enhanced by suitable technologies such as social media, along with culturally sensitive pedagogical practices, as the voluntary effort given is reciprocated.

Effective practices in curriculum and teaching are becoming more important in Japan and elsewhere in Pacific Asia, while research, communication, and Web skills can be turned to community service. For young people are not automatically motivated toward a foreign language, and teachers in Asia are generally expected to provide such motivation. Faculty members are increasingly drawn into outreach efforts, placed in a humbler yet broader role in education. Rather than waiting passively, this chapter bespeaks taking initiatives to ride the technological waves as they break with greatest effectiveness towards pedagogical goals.

Young people in Pacific Asia, facing the atomization brought about by such factors as the breakdown of traditional communities due to urbanization as well as by educational competition, are spontaneously reconstituting communities online particularly through social networking sites (SNS). Educators can thus reach learners where young people look for friendship and information by similarly forming collaborative relationships utilizing the affordances of social and other online media. Considering the social ills reported in

connection with existing educational systems in Pacific Asia, there is a need for educators with online skills and dedication to develop more constructive teacher-student relationships.

Possible reforms in teaching approaches to help children or college students “develop holistically” (HuRights Osaka, 2006) could take the form of media that are motivating to students by reigniting their natural joy of discovery. Online technological affordances offer the sometimes stifling classroom environment a two-way window to interact with the world, or to turn the transient and socially distant teacher-student relationship into an ongoing human relationship maintaining the learner’s connection to the target language community.

Regarding specific cases, a trend of reaching secondary school students through online media was reported, while Case 1 represented an initiative to reinforce the motivation of potential or future students to major in English. The SNS Mixi, which the author has also used with college students, was already popular with high school students as well. Time was expanded on the other side as Mixi was used to reach a student after graduation in Case 4. Besides encouraging learners to have a more positive view of the L2 community, there were deliverable benefits as well as gestures of appreciation by students, their parents and other community stakeholders more than could be recounted in this text.

There were instances reported of publishing in new media, including videoblogging for a campus newsletter site. Students’ articles appeared on the open Web (Case 3) and could therefore reach a wider audience. Two of the students in the Case 5 project actually co-authored an article about their experience studying abroad in New Zealand for the Case 3 Web publication project later in 2009. In historical perspective, most of the writings, images and video contents such as reported here, which were evidently motivating to L2 learners, may not have been published at all in previous media.

Case 2 and Case 5 involved making YouTube videos for different purposes but were produced in authentic collaboration with students. If recording English speaking by students were the sole purpose, then podcasting, as introduced earlier, or some other audio technology would suffice. There is also a default ten-minute limit on YouTube videos to consider aside from the large size of original video file formats. In Case 2 the idea of introducing a course with an online video, analogous to a screencast but adding students’ reactions to the Web-based activities, was shown to be motivating to students and of wide applicability to educational institutions in the future. In Case 5 the idea of ‘vlogging abroad’ was another

application of online video that was observed to motivate students, with further appreciation expressed in parental feedback and internal campus communications.

Revisiting the definition of online innovations by Crosta & Prieto, the application of which can be independent of quantifiable results, the Case 5 videoblogging and elements of other cases seem to meet the criteria for innovation by combining technological and sociological breakthroughs with improved services to e-learning users (2009, pp. 1-2). Technologies were used in new ways, strikingly new to some of those reached such as parents. Customary teacher-student relations in the society were transcended, such as through voluntary collaboration and more attention to individual learners, which affirms their identity, worth, and aspirations. The improved services were clearest for parents of students and other college stakeholders in the case of videoblogging. Photos had been blogged from abroad before, but not videos. Online publications also provided services to writers as well as readers, such as by giving English majors an accomplishment in their field. Provided the pedagogical practices and technological tools fit worthy purposes and the subjects targeted, what was perhaps most generally innovative was to expand the radius of action in most available dimensions where learners could be reached. That is at least a starting point to create new opportunities for people to learn.

To reach and endeavor to motivate language learners not only outside of class but from before admission to after graduation represents a paradigm shift in what it can possibly mean to be an educator in society. Teachers can now, for instance, find out more about the long-term results of their teaching in their students’ actual lives. Conversely, students can continue to draw motivation from messages to them or milestones in the teacher’s life and research posted to social media. The spatial and temporal restraints that bounded human relationships to semester schedules have been breached. The potential teachable moments or opportunities to enhance students’ motivation to communicate with the L2 target community have become virtually unlimited. When the teacher utilizes technologies that students use, generational and other sociocultural barriers can be surmounted. Furthermore, if the teacher utilizes cutting-edge technologies that students would like to learn, a motivational sense of challenge can be kindled. The teacher can thereby become a model of technological empowerment as well as of bilingualism.

References

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See the author’s online library of publications: http://www.waoe.org/steve/epublist.html