Abstract
The languaging curriculum involves learning to strategically make use of available tools and resources to successfully do things with English for real-world purposes. In this article, we describe how languaging was implemented in a task where students communicate about a hobby of their choice on Reddit discussion forums. Over three weeks, the students learned to analyse existing posts on the Reddit forums and to apply language use strategies, tools and resources to interact successfully with other hobby enthusiasts. Data gathered from the students’ learning reflections suggest that the aims of this innovative task were achieved. The students engaged in successful real-world communication, changed their attitudes towards the nature of English and English language learning, and learnt how to exploit existing examples to produce their own effective contributions. More than half of the students were still communicating on Reddit six months after the end of the course. Two key challenges were identified that require further research: the need for teachers to change their beliefs about the nature of language teaching, especially the importance of accuracy; and problems with how to assess students’ successful communication.
Introduction
At the Thai university where the authors work, there was a general dissatisfaction with current English teaching practices. Students were not intrinsically motivated, there seemed to be little improvement in their overall proficiency, and many students tried to avoid engaging with English outside their classroom. Looking for an alternative, we decided to try out the languaging curriculum, which involves learning to strategically make use of available tools and resources to successfully do things with English for real-world purposes (Watson Todd and Rangsarittikun, 2021). As a potential new paradigm, the languaging curriculum has its roots in three recent movements. First, in the discipline of linguistic philosophy, languaging argues that the goal of language learning is for students ‘to participate in cultural worlds and learn that they can get things done with others’ (Thibault, 2017: 76), rather than the traditional goal of learning the language. Second, in the second stage of the English as a lingua franca movement (Jenkins, 2015), the focus is on language use strategies with little emphasis placed on accurate language production. Third, reflective experiential learning (Kohonen, 2007; Tudor, 2001) argues that learners learn through doing things with language and reflecting on their experiences. Principles underpinning the use of the languaging curriculum include:
Focus on doing things with English, rather than the English language itself. Focus on successful communication, not accuracy. Focus on the process of using language, not the product. Focus on language use strategies, not language forms. Focus on real-world language use, not classroom practice. Being non-judgemental about how students use language.
These principles require a shift in teacher mindset, as the languaging curriculum challenges many widely held beliefs in language teaching. It is therefore important to show how the languaging curriculum can be put into practice.
In the languaging curriculum we set up, there are three courses: the hobby course (the focus of this article); the review course, which involves writing text reviews and creating video reviews of products or services; and the Wikipedia course, which involves writing or extensively revising a full article on Wikipedia (see Watson Todd and Towns, 2021) where academic tools, resources and strategies and the ability to judiciously use grammar-checking tools become important. In this paper, we present one of three main tasks in the hobby course. This task involves communication on social media, specifically the Reddit discussion forums.
The Teaching Context
This teaching innovation was implemented at a Thai technological university as a fundamental English course for undergraduates on international programmes. The course lasted 15 weeks with three hours of instruction per week and was taught in 2020, meaning that nearly all instruction was online due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
The practices and data reported in this article came from 68 students in total, all aged 18 or 19. Their proficiency levels in the CEFR framework ranged from a few at C1 or C2 levels, the majority at B1 or B2, and a couple at A2.
The task focused on in this article ran through weeks 7–9 of the course, with one three-hour session each week. As its name suggests, the hobby course centred around students learning about hobbies they were interested in, a topic chosen for its potential to promote intrinsic motivation. In weeks 1 and 2, students chose a hobby to study, which they learnt about from reading websites and watching videos in weeks 3–6. Weeks 7–9 (the focus of this article) involved students communicating with other hobbyists using Reddit discussion forums. In weeks 10–14, students produced a video about their hobby and posted it on YouTube. Students also wrote reflective journals on their experiences (the source of the data presented below).
One challenging feature of this course is that because each student chose a different hobby, every student was exposed to and produced language in contexts different from every other student. The hobbies chosen included outdoor recreation (e.g. hiking, biking), arts (e.g. digital drawing, playing the guitar) and games (e.g. yoyoing). To provide a common core for illustrating language use strategies and how to exploit available tools and resources, in the lessons the teacher used origami as a sample hobby.
Reasons for the Innovation
In addition to our dissatisfaction with current practice, we had other reasons for implementing the languaging curriculum. In many of the testcentric education systems in Asia, including in Thailand, the English language is perceived as an object to be studied rather than a tool for communication (Watson Todd, 2015). The clear focus on communication in the languaging curriculum may address this issue.
One feature of the languaging approach is its focus on language use strategies. In an uncertain world where flexibility is a key asset and where future contexts of English use are unclear (Yano, 2009), a focus on generalizable strategies is likely to be more useful than the traditional focus on predetermined text types and linguistic objectives and can be used effectively with highly heterogeneous groups of students.
In this article, we are focusing on a task from the middle of the course where the students communicate about their hobbies on Reddit. Reddit is a social media site with over 100,000 topic-specific communities called subreddits, making it likely that students will be able to find a relevant community on their chosen hobby. In the languaging curriculum, we use Reddit as an online affinity space ‘where interactions with other users are formed around shared interests rather than personal connections’ (Yeh and Swinehart, 2019: 154). Reddit allows users to submit posts, comment on others’ posts, and vote posts up or down.
Description of the Innovation
While the task focuses on Reddit as a medium of communication, in taking a languaging approach students will use certain strategies (such as analysing successful examples and exploring useful words and phrases), available tools (such as Google Translate and concordancing programs) and existing resources (the Reddit posts of others on their subreddit) in ways that could be applied to other communication contexts in the future.
Overview of Approach
The three class sessions focused on helping students to analyse successful posts in their subreddit forums as models for their own writing, following Vygotsky's (1987) notion of imitation rather than blind copying. The materials used on the course can be found at https://solatlc.wixsite.com/languaging/hobby-course
Preparation
In this preparation stage, starting in week 7, we sought to ensure that the students could gain an overview of Reddit pages and understand the different types of online discussion about a hobby. Using the origami subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/origami) as an example, the students were asked to explore the main page to identify the important sections of the Reddit forum. They then conducted a keyword search of their hobby, explored the possible subgroups related to the hobby and identified the group's basic information. Given the students’ preference for using Google Translate, the teacher used this opportunity to raise their awareness of the limitations of automated translation while asking them to read the group regulations, as some of the translations into Thai were inappropriate (e.g. ‘don't take credit’ was translated into Thai as ‘don't carry any credit’).
Using the origami subreddit again, the posts were analysed to see which category received the most replies. From the example, motivation posts (e.g. ‘What's so great about Origami?’) were most likely to attain many responses from other subscribers. The students then analysed existing posts about their hobby to identify the types of questions that other hobby enthusiasts commonly asked, such as a straight question (e.g. ‘What websites do you recommend for beginner origami tutorials?’) or a statement (e.g. ‘Just wanting to know whats easy paper to get in bigger sizes to complete this model’).
The class then explored useful phrases to start posts. Initially, the students analysed the language of questions in general. Following that, the students explored words and phrases in existing posts in their forum to identify ones that they could imitate when they write their own posts. At the end of the class, the teacher encouraged the students to share some interesting useful phrases with their classmates on an online platform.
In the following week, the main focus shifted towards gaining insights into the Reddit forum's interactions. The students were asked to access the forum dedicated to their hobby, browsing through the posts to identify patterns of forum interaction. Then the teacher exemplified the various types of comments through the origami posts.
The language used in the forum interactions was also focused on in this phase. Students were guided in how to use online tools to understand how hobbyists interacted on the forum, and to identify salient patterns of language use in real-world contexts. For example, an online concordancing tool (https://www.wordandphrase.info/analyzeText.asp) allows students to explore useful lexical patterns in their model texts. Analysing how other hobbyists communicated with each other highlighted the frequent use of words providing encouragement to pursue a hobby (e.g. ‘nice’, ‘pretty’, ‘awesome’, ‘cool’). Then, to promote an inductive understanding of how words are used in authentic contexts and to increase confidence in their own language use, the students were guided to examine the collocates and concordance lines of words they thought they would like to use. Figure 1 shows the concordancing tool results for ‘awesome’. From these, students could see that ‘awesome’ is most commonly used at the end of sentences, a pattern they could imitate in their own posts.
The collocates and concordance lines of the word ‘awesome’.
Action
Having provided support for students to participate in the communities on their subreddit, in week 9, the students started posting about their own hobby. This gave the students an opportunity to apply what they had learnt in the previous stage, by exploiting tools and resources to start discussions and interact on the Reddit forums. The posts depended on the hobby they had chosen. Some examples of the students’ posts include asking for general advice on the hobby (e.g. ‘What moves in yoyo that are easy to start practicing with. And what kind of yoyo are good for beginners.’), asking for specific tricks to do the hobby (e.g. for a biking subreddit ‘How can I go over a bridge faster and use less energy?’) and showing their finished product (e.g. for a jigsaw subreddit ‘Basilius Kathedrale; 500 pieces’) (see Figure 2).
Screenshots of the students’ posts on Reddit.
As a matter of common courtesy, the students were advised to respond to comments on their posts. To do this, students were encouraged to analyse existing replies to see how to write their own replies. They were also encouraged to offer help and give suggestions to other Redditors, by responding to posts of others related to their hobby.
Overall, the lessons within this teaching innovation focused on familiarizing students with tools and resources (e.g. Wordandphrase.info) and language use strategies (e.g. imitating successful models) that would enable them to interact successfully with other hobbyists on Reddit. Since each student pursued a different hobby and examined different subreddits, they were exposed to different language input and experienced different communication issues. The focus on tools and strategies enabled each student to be successful despite the different contexts in which they were communicating, and this approach is also generalizable to any context where there are existing models to imitate.
Reflection
As part of the course evaluation, the students wrote two learning reflections. Overall, even though many of them were not familiar with this social media platform, they had positive experiences in using Reddit. Several students felt that Reddit as a supportive community where people share mutual interests motivated them to pursue their hobby: Being in a place surrounded by people who share the same passion as you do and learning through their stories and experiences is a great motivation for me to continue doing my chosen hobby and try to do my best to be better at it. (Student 8)
In their Reddit communications, the students were successful in achieving their hobby goals: In Reddit I ask the question is ‘How to start collecting?’, and I got the answer about source of trading of toy or model figure. (Student 3)
The fact that they managed to elicit useful responses from other hobby enthusiasts indicates that they could communicate successfully with others. They also realized that this successful communication was not necessarily related to the accuracy of their language use. For example: Grammar isn't everything. If you don't know grammar but you still can communicate with each other in the community that you are in. (Student 4)
Such views led some to question the value of much of their previous English learning.
In terms of language use strategies, we found in many reflections that the students employed a range of strategies to communicate on the forum successfully. The most commonly used strategy was analysing successful models to create their own posts. For example: Since every subreddit groups are different from each other, categorizing these posts is a big help in giving us an idea on what's the frequently used type of post that is more noticeable and could give us more interaction with the other members of our groups. (Student 3)
Certain tools and resources were also clearly related to successful communication on Reddit. Google Translate, for instance, allowed students to gain a better understanding of the conversations in their subreddits: My hobby is swimming i went in to find out on reddit what they had to say about swimming which is an activity that i already enjoy doing so i enjoy it although i have to use google translate in translation a lot of things. (Student 14)
More importantly, some students became more critical about the use of this automated translation tool, mentioning that Google Translate needs to be used appropriately: I’ve use Google translate for many years, I cannot understand context when I translate long passage or even a long sentence, Google translate is good for translating word by word. (Student 7)
The students’ successful communications on Reddit and the supportive and knowledgeable nature of the Reddit communities enabled the students to develop their hobbies, to gain knowledge that they would not be able to access in their first language, to develop personally, and to continue to improve their English through constant exposure: I can remember the day I learn this lesson that is the first day that I use reddit seriously and after that day when I have a problem about my hobby I always use reddit because in Thai community that not have much member. (Student 12)
In the same time, we can improve our English skill and have a chance to communicate with other people in the community that like the same activity. Even the course is finished, we still can continuously communicate and improve our skill. (Student 18)
All of these benefits meant that many of the students continued to use Reddit after the course finished. The key goal of the hobby course is to motivate students to be willing to use English outside the classroom. So, to gauge the success of this innovative teaching, we conducted an informal survey asking whether students still used Reddit after the course. From the informal survey of students six months after the end of the course, 29 of 46 students (63%) were still using the Reddit hobby community and thus were receiving a substantial amount of exposure to English.
Future Pedagogical Directions
The philosophy of the languaging curriculum enabled the students to learn to strategically make use of tools (analysing exiting posts on the Reddit forums using the concordancing tool), to successfully do things (communicating successfully on the forums) and to use English for real-world purposes (interacting about a hobby with other hobby enthusiasts). We, however, found two key challenges in running the hobby course. First, as a new paradigm, the languaging approach presents challenges for teachers, especially in the need to be non-judgemental about the students’ language. For most teachers, the need to shift mindset means that they have to revise their ideas about the importance of accuracy. Second, how to assess students remains a problem. As the key criterion is success in communication, not accuracy, for the Reddit task students were scored on whether, and the extent to which, their posts elicited responses from other hobby enthusiasts (when compared to existing successful posts on their Reddit forum) and their efforts to respond to comments. This is an area where further research and possibly new models of assessment are needed.
Through the languaging curriculum, students become able to use tools and resources, to apply language use strategies, and to do things in English for real-world purposes. There are also clear indications that the use of Reddit in the hobby course promotes motivation, engagement and confidence in using English. Together, these benefits mean that the majority of students continue using and being exposed to English outside the course, thereby providing further opportunities for development. With these outcomes, we believe that the languaging curriculum has the potential to become a valuable new paradigm in English language teaching.
