To continue the topic from another angle: learners prefer books –Â don’t they? Here’s a blog post by Michael Griffin who was talking to a Korean student about why they don’t really use learning apps on their phones. Some really interesting insights there: for example, the student said that the phone is a personal thing that is used to relax after a hard day of work or studies, so no one uses it for more studying. Could that be true for your learners and for you as well? Is this why we don’t really use tech for learning as much as we probably could?
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Thank you for sharing this and for the thoughts on it. I have been wondering if I was just a little bit early with this post because I think things have changed since I wrote it and my sense is that Korean students are using their phones and apps a lot more than a mere 5 years ago. Thank you also for this informative series as well!
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Hi Mike 🙂 So, things have changed since then? It seems that we’re a bit behind here in terms of mobile penetration, so perhaps this is something that is going to happen for us too?
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Thanks for the response! I have the sense that things have shifted a bit but I am not 100% sure. Korea is known as a very wired country so I was surprised in the past that people were not using their phones to improve their English but my sense is that it’s more commonplace now than just a few short years ago. I had lots of students who used the TED talks app while commuting, for example. It will be interesting to see how things change in both countries and around the world. 🙂
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Yeah, let’s keep track of what’s happening 🙂 I think it also really depends on how effective those learning apps are and what exactly they do: e.g. the TED app is great for passive extensive listening, so it’s ideal for mobiles, but doing grammar activities perhaps is more effective on paper. So, the more apps there are that are actually effective, the more our learners in all countries are going to use them – perhaps?
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