Language learning activity and online tasks

I'd like to begin by asking a simple question:

What makes us human?

And I'd like to argue that making

and using tools is what essentially makes us human and sets us appart from other species.

Such as this Clovis spearhead found in Arizona

13,000 years ago.

We started making tools to attain objectives

and then we started making them beautiful,

and that was the beginning of art and possibly religion.

We were basically imagining a different reality,

hoping for something different.

A few years ago I had a student who during a language class

in the computer lab started talking to the computer,

even gesturing to it, and that really caught my attention.

After some research I found out that that phenomenon was called private speech

or egocentric speech, and that was the origin of my research interest.

This presentation is on language learning activity and online tasks

which is my current research interest.

My name is Carlos Montoro.

I'm a lecturer at the University of Guanajuato

and I'm also doing a Doctorate in Education

at the Open University under Dr. Regine Hampel's supervision.

As I said, I was fascinated by the student talking to the computer.

Basically, what she was doing is she was talking to herself.

That interest in what she was doing led me to find out a broader theory that could

explain what was going on; and that was Activity Theory.

Activity Theory claims that we have subjects, such as the learner I was mentioning,

who want to attain an object, for instance, learning English.

You could think of this as a stimulus-response relationship.

But Activity Theory very clearly says that it's not.

Relationships within an activity system are complex and mutually dependent.

Leontiev, an author who developed Activity Theory in its origins,

provides an example which may help to illustrate how Activity Theory sees activity.

He uses the example of hunting.

Hunting is triggered by a need for food,

which creates the motivation to obtain preys.

Hunters perform certain actions, not all of them directed to attain the object directly,

which is interesting,

in the pursuit of hunting down animals.

But as we were saying the system is complex.

Hunters have to adapt to certain conditions of the terrain and to the reactions of the animals.

Activity Theory originated with Marx and Cultural Historical Materialism

in the 1920s in Russia.

Vygotsky and Leontiev were probably the most significant developers of the theory.

Activity is basically a system of mutually-transforming subject-object relationships.

And Activity Theory aims to analise the genesis, structure and processes of the activity

in a natural setting.

Any activity is the activity of a subject, with agency,

who purposefully aims to fulfill certain needs.

Agency could be defined as the ability and the need to act,

which is typical of human beings.

The motivation is what determines the orientation to a task.

Motives are socio-culturally determined.

Very significantly, human activity is mediated by cultural artifacts,

which are historically and culturally produced and reproduced by different means.

In this system relationships are complex and multi-dimensional.

Let's apply the system to language learning activity.

Here we have the specific interaction of the learner

with others using specific tools and resources oriented towards achieving specific outcomes.

The subject is the learner.

The object is a motive, such as learning English,

and in the particular case of the experiment I'm conducting the goal is to speak English.

Tools in this case are the computer, the CALL task that I'm using,

dictionaries and other resources in the self-access environment where the experiment took place.

Support was available from peers and from the teacher both online and face to face.

However, if you look at the system you may find something missing which is quite important: society.

And this is where Yrjö Engeström comes in.

He expanded the original triangle of the activity system

to include new elements.

For example, rules, and in the case of my experiment

those rules are a time limit the participants had to complete the task,

the grammaticality of the language the participants used,

affordances of the self-access and the online environments,

and certain conventions regarding introductions,

which was the topic of the task.

The community consists of the teacher, stakeholders, peers, self-access and IT staff,

the university management and I would like to argue that an imaginary native interlocutor too.

The division of labour was as follows:

the teacher prepared the task, the hardware, the software,

the teacher was available for support and feedback,

learners had to do the task,

peers were there to provide support as well,

as were self-access and IT staff,

and the management had to provide all the resources for everything to work smoothly.

The outcome in this particular case was a video

that the learners had to produce where they introduce themselves in English.

The intention was to put up the video on YouTube eventually,

although this was not obligatory.

Now as you can see Engeström expanded the activity system.

It now consists of not only a much bigger triangle

but also of a number of smaller triangles

which affect all the different elements.

In the experiment that I conducted I could observe

contradictions, particularly between elements

in the triangle subject, tools and community.

Let me explain that briefly.

For instance, contradictions between the subject and the task as a tool were observed

because the task was too hard for the students to complete it successfully.

This had implications in terms of task design; some changes had to be made

to make the task more accessible to students.

Contradictions were also observed between the task and the community

in that the IT provision was clearly inadequate.

For instance, the internet connection speed was too slow and that prevented students

from completing whole sections of the task.

Finally, contradictions were also observed between the subject and the community

in that a subject at one point expressed annoyance

at being disturbed by noise that came from other

self-access users at the time, something that is worth considering too.

These are my references.

Engeström as I mentioned, who was responsible for the expanded activity system.

Leontiev and Vygotsky, who were the original creators of Activity Theory

and the notion of the activity system.

If you'd like to know more about my research you can go to that link.

If you'd like to know more about the University of Guanajuato where I work you'll find the information

at that link.

And finally you can find this information on YouTube

by typing the keywords learning activity.

Thank you very much.