Pilar 1: Requerimientos Mínimos de Capital Regulatorio

At the research site, ICT infrastructure and existing student CMC practices offer promise for facilitating student engagement with foreign peers and texts, but social learning affordances are underused.

My study’s fourth research question asked about the types of pedagogical affordances and practices at the research site that appear to enhance students’

critical engagement with foreign texts and interlocutors via CMC. I found that students’ current mobile CMC practices—especially their “fluency” with the use of a variety of social media platforms—present unique opportunities for facilitating their engagement with foreign peers and texts. However, data showed that such social learning affordances are mostly unexploited at the research site. As evident from some of the excerpts already presented above, many students use their mobile phones to access English-language news and entertainment media. They also use social networking sites to maintain relationships with friends from other countries and foreigners living in Japan. Statements such as that in N18 (quoted above) that “ . . . when using ICT for English communication, I decided on Facebook” were common, and they indicate that the foreign language learners in my study readily adapt to new communication tools and practices that align with their language acquisition and social goals. What was rare in student narratives—and in my observations and field notes—were reports of structured uses of ICT tools for cross-cultural communication and learning, or for deep engagement with foreign texts and ‘cross-talk’ about such texts. For example, though students noted that ICT was occasionally used in connection with coursework in their classes, none referred to pedagogically-structured, dialogic engagement with foreign texts or interlocutors. I reviewed syllabi for required classes in the department where data was collected, and found that such opportunities are not offered to students at the research site. One notable exception is described below, but this was part of a one-off extra-curricular project conducted by faculty members and student volunteers.

The two “e-learning” classes that are offered at the research site via video link are “content” courses that follow a traditional lecture format. The classes thus require students to engage with teachers located abroad (in America and Australia) in video-mediated class sessions, and via email when submitting assignments. But in both cases, students learn about cultures as objects of study rather than as a set of practices to be understood through experience, dialogue and interaction.

Though the structure of these lecture-based e-learning courses offer limited interactive potential, field notes from my own involvement with students in a single tele-collaborative exchange that was part of a campus sustainability research project revealed tele-collaborative project-based learning to be one area where students’ CMC fluency could potentially be leveraged for dialogic critical engagement with foreign texts and interlocutors. The project involved the use of Skype as a medium for the exchange of local information related to environmental sustainability efforts at the research site and at a university campus in the United States of America.

In a critical incident report I wrote about this experience with an international Skype video-conferencing session, I noted that students made significant efforts to prepare for their tele-collaborative exchange by researching the partner university online and preparing questions for their interlocutors in the U.S. They were thus able to obtain valuable information about the partner

university’s more advanced campus sustainability efforts. Through their dialogic interactions with a professor, a student, and a campus sustainability officer at the partner institution, students were also able to share and discover ways that local practices are intertwined with social and geographical factors. My report notes that the shared concern for campus sustainability led to unforeseen student questions about local contexts and practices within these contexts. For example, my notes on a debriefing session held with students after the above- mentioned exchange revealed that my students appeared to gain new insights into the deeply embedded “car culture” of the American West, and some of the social, economic, and geographic realities that shape this culture. This in turn led to reflections after the conference call on commuting practices at our own university, and how these relate to campus sustainability goals.

As can be seen in Chapter Five, my field notes also pointed to ways that the built environment of the campus research site appears to limit the potential for students to collaborate with each other and with faculty outside of the classroom. As I will explore in Chapter Seven, and in the concluding chapter of this thesis, the location of the campus, the physical learning spaces it offers, and the overall characteristics of the built environment within which practices take place appears to be integral to the development of CMC practices that can lead to increased degrees of symbolic competence.

Chapter Summary

This chapter presented four major findings that were revealed by this study. Findings each related to the study’s four main research questions, and drew

upon data from student narratives, researcher field notes, and critical incident reports. The chapter presented extensive data from student-participants that, taken together, narrates a picture of CMC practice that will be further analyzed in the following chapter.

Data showed that students engage in a very wide variety of multilingual CMC practices as a means of socializing, gathering information, and sharing with peers and others. Student CMC practices centered mostly around the use of mobile devices (smartphones). Students reported adopting many new practices after entering university as they interacted with local peers. The practices they reported differed significantly from their high school CMC practices, involving a wider range of media and expanded social circles associated with “native” communication apps like LINE, and also globally popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Students are mindful of privacy concerns and about their choices of different platforms for different communicative purposes; however, they lack broader media literacy. Further, at the research site, affordances for developing media literacy and broader symbolic competence were found to be underused.

In the next chapter, I undertake a deeper exploration of the CMC practices reported here. I frame these practices within larger cultural discourses and discourse practices, and within the unique contextual constraints of the research site.