Online informal learning of English through smartphones in Slovenia

Abstract

The accessibility of online resources in English means that today informal contexts offer a multitude of language development opportunities. The main objective of this paper concerns the investigation of smartphone use for the online informal learning of English among undergraduate students in Slovenia. An online survey and semi-structured interviews were used to explore the most frequent smartphone activities involving language use, the predominant language for these activities, and the level of co-evolution between smartphone activities in English and perceived language competence in English. The results show that, despite the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies, the participants still predominantly access online content for receptive rather than interactive/productive activities, in particular when English and not their mother tongue is involved. In terms of perceived communicative competence and online informal learning of English, the results indicate the co-evolution of two complex dynamic systems: the use of the digital context in English and the system of participants’ communicative competence levels in English.