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 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. 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 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. 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

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