The purpose of this report is to contribute to an understanding of the technological, institutional, and social conditions that affect language learning and the different ways that adults can undertake the activity of language learning over two to four years within these conditions.
Data for this report was collected between 2012 and 2016 from twelve learners enrolled in beginner-level courses in foreign languages taught by distance at a regional Swedish university. From asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated interviews over this period, a narrative of each subject’s learning process was constructed to illustrate language learning contexts and trajectories. These contexts and trajectories are conceptualized through the personal learning environment (PLE) placed in an activity-theory (AT) framework. The PLE encompasses contextual factors that can affect the learning process, rather than focusing solely on ICT tools, to contribute to an understanding of how new tools can interact with old tools and with the other affordances and constraints in a learner’s surroundings. This report reveals some of the contradictory pressures that teachers, curricula, institutions, social welfare systems and ICT can exert on a PLE.
Previous longitudinal and narrative research on language learning is described and placed in the AT framework to identify the factors relevant to the PLE and organized according to the AT features of subjects, objects, tools, rules, community, and division of labor as well as evidence of change over time.
Both the previous research and the empirical material analyzed in this report illustrate the significant role played by communities in shaping language-learning goals. Teachers can be seen as part of the target language community and play an important role in defining the kinds of tasks that make language studies interesting and relevant to learners’ goals. Learning institutions exert pressure on teachers through curricula and program requirements. Other institutional structures determine how education is funded, which can create situations in which learners intentionally choose courses or institutions whose curricula do not match their own learning goals.
While learners express a preference for campus studies, in many cases online distance courses are the only learning form that allows for a given learner to engage in institution-based learning. However, the further a learner gets from an institution, the more difficulties they may encounter, with some online tools becoming inconvenient, incompatible, or unreliable across borders and time zones.
Social media can bring learners in contact with TL communities from afar, but it can also keep some learners from engaging in local TL communities fully.
In short, adult foreign language learners’ PLEs and trajectories within university distance education in Sweden in the 2010s can take many different configurations depending on an individual learner’s own goals and personal objectives, location, and even health.
Örebro: Örebro University , 2021. , p. 123
Computer-assisted language learning (CALL), distance learning, adult language learning, personal learning environments (PLE), activity theory, narrative research in education