The mobile app Schnëssen is intended to establish a state-of-the-art digital platform to collect data on the present-day language situation of Luxembourgish by means of crowd-sourcing and to document and present results to a broader public. Users can participate in a large set of audio recordings tasks and in sociolinguistic surveys. By presenting all audio recordings via an interactive map, participants can explore the language variation of their language. In the first year of data collection, around 210.000 recordings could be collected for numerous variation phenomena from all linguistic levels and over 2800 sociolinguistic questionnaires have been filled out. The app allowed us to compile thus the largest systematic spoken language corpus of Luxembourgish.

Smartphones, tablets, and touch screen laptops, are powerful tools capable of accommodating hundreds of specialized, complex operations and applications to anyone, seemingly anywhere in the world. As close to all tertiary students own and/or have access to one of these devices, it is natural for language teachers to be interested in how these devices can be used to leverage the language learning process. This short paper considers some of the built-in, core applications or “apps” which come with smartphones when they are unboxed. The potential uses for voice recorders, video cameras, timers and digital cameras in the language classroom will all be presented in an effort to stress the importance and value of these language-learning tools.

Use and development of applications for smartphones (so-called ‘apps’) continue to rise, and it comes as no surprise that language learning apps (such as Google Translate) are immensely popular among the younger generation. But, do these apps actual help students learn a language and, if so, how is apps usage influenced by the proficiency of the language learner? Our research focused on the use of apps related to language learning in two major Korean universities. Koreans are known to be high-tech users and avid language learners, and Korea can therefore provide a good model for how education and technology intersect. We asked students studying German, Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu to inform us about the role that smartphone apps play in their language learning, both at home and in a formal education setting (e.g., classroom). Results showed that one important determiner for how apps were used was language proficiency. We further found an interaction effect between proficiency in English...

In the “Acknowledgements” to Sociolinguistics and mobile communication, Deumert comments that during the writing process, the text “developed a life of its own” and took her on a journey to places, both theoretical and virtual, which she had not anticipated (p. x). What makes her book such a pleasure to read is that it takes her audience on the same journey, now carefully planned and crafted to ensure maximum coherence, interest and accessibility.

Language-learning apps have become a popular way to learn a new language in recent years, however there is relatively little research about their effectiveness as a language-learning tool. This study will first evaluate the essential and desired pedagogy of language-learning apps by focusing on seven themes: input, output and interaction; form-focused learning; meaning-focused leaning; authenticity; learner autonomy; motivation; and language learning strategies. Then both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to conduct research on the user experience of people who have used language-learning apps to study a new language in order to learn more about their attitudes, opinions and personal behaviours. The aim of the study is to find out what components are necessary for a language-learning app to be considered an effective learning tool. The findings show that language-learning apps are beneficial for learning a new language because they provide sufficient comprehensible input, feedback for error correction, form- focused learning and motivation. The most successful users will complement language- learning apps with other learning strategies in order to make up for the apps’ limitations. However, the research shows that language-learning apps could be improved by incorporating a greater variety of lessons and activities, allowing the learner to choose which topics they want to study within the app, providing more meaning-focused activities to develop the learners’ listening and reading comprehension skills and including more activities that focus on improving learners’ speaking and writing.

We present a concept and tool for studying language use in everyday mobile text communication (e.g. chats). Our approach for the first time enables researchers to collect comprehensive data on language use during unconstrained natural typing (i.e. no study tasks) without logging readable messages to preserve privacy. We achieve this with a combination of three customisable text abstraction methods that run directly on participants' phones. We report on our implementation as an Android keyboard app and two evaluations: First, we simulate text reconstruction attempts on a large text corpus to inform conditions for minimising privacy risks. Second, we assess people's experiences in a two-week field deployment (N=20). We release our app as an open source project to the community to facilitate research on open questions in HCI, Linguistics and Psychology. We conclude with concrete ideas for future studies in these areas.