The use of mobile technology in the teaching and learning of foreign languages in French-speaking Belgium: the learners’ perspective.

Van de Vyver, Julie [UCL]

In the last two decades several private and public initiatives have been contributing to the development and the integration of technological tools in secondary education. In Belgium, governmental projects such as ‘les plans Cyberécole et Cyberclasse’ since 1999 and 2005, ‘l’Ecole Numérique’ since 2011 and the recent ‘plan du Numérique (see www.ecolenumerique.be and www.digitalwallonia.be for more details) have been set up to equip schools and educational environments with, among others, computers and tablets. Whilst surveys have regularly been conducted to evaluate the access to technologies in our secondary schools, little is known about the actual use and integration of these technologies in classrooms in general and in our foreign language learning classrooms in particular. In addition, despite available information about the access to computers in schools, the use of mobile tools has largely been underinvestigated. CALL researchers have shown increasing interest in MALL, as the creation of the EUROCALL MALL SIG and the organization of the related two-day symposium testifies. As a consequence, I have chosen to investigate the use of MALL in Belgium, focusing on language learning in the last 3 years of secondary education in the French-speaking Federation Wallonia-Brussels. My presentation aims to assess the pupils’ ownership, use and knowledge of mobile technologies in and outside the classroom. In order to do so, I designed three online questionnaires for pupils, teachers and school principals. The descriptive analysis of the results will first provide an overview of the current presence of the computer, the tablet and the smartphone in our pupils’ life. The second part will then focus on the use of these tools in the learning of foreign languages. The aim of this investigation is to foster the use of mobile technologies, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, by providing training to the different stakeholders in education.