Journal Contents

all articles of volume 8 issue 3 | return to Journal Contents

Article of Volume 8, Issue 3, September 2013

Crossing boundaries: Students' framing of language learning activities in Facebook

Authors: Annika Lantz-Andersson, Sylvi Vigmo, Rhonwen Bowen

Abstract: Young people’s interaction online is rapidly increasing, which enables new spaces for communication; the impact on learning, however, is not yet acknowledged in education. The aim of this exploratory case study is to scrutinize how students frame their interaction in social networking sites (SNS) in school practices and what that implies for educational language teaching and learning practices. Analytically, the study departs from a sociocultural perspective on learning, and adopts conceptual distinctions of frame analysis. The results based on ethnographic data from a Facebook group in English-learning classes, with 60 students aged between 13 and 16 from Colombia, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan indicate that there is a possibility for boundary crossing, which could generate extended spaces for collaborative language-learning activities in educational contexts where students combine their school subject of learning language and their communicative use of language in their everyday life. Such extended spaces are, however, difficult to maintain and have to be recurrently negotiated. To take advantage of young people’s various dynamic communicative uses of language in their everyday life in social media, the implementation of such media for educational purposes has to be deliberately, collaboratively and dynamically negotiated by educators and students to form a new language-learning space with its own potentials and constraints.

Keywords: SNS, Boundary crossing, Extended spaces, Computer-supported collaborative learning, Language-learning activities, Facebook, Framing

Citation: Lantz-Andersson, A., Vigmo, S., & Bowen, R. (2013) Crossing boundaries: Students' framing of language learning activities in Facebook. ijcscl 8 (3), pp. 293-312

DOI: 10.1007/s11412-012-9162-z

Preprint: lantz-andersson_vigmo_bowen_8_3.pdf

About this article at link.springer.com [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11412-012-9162-z] including a link to the official electronic version.