This paper presents the results of a study exploring the intercultural development of first-year Japanese university students engaged in online intercultural exchange (OIE) using two variations: one implementing guided reflection, and the other relying on the learner autonomy model. Intercultural development was quantitatively measured using the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (Chen & Starosta, 2000) and qualitatively investigated through participants’ written reflections. Results of the OIE using guided reflection showed significant gains in respect for the target culture, whereas the OIE that followed the autonomous learning model yielded significant gains in self-efficacy in relation to intercultural contact. Qualitative analysis of student reflections confirmed these findings and provided insight into the processes involved in achieving these results.

This qualitative study investigates a media transfer project in which a digital game was used to promote student creativity in an English as a foreign language (EFL) class. The paper first addresses the potential of opportunities for stimulating student creativity and motivation. Creativity has been highlighted as a core competency and has garnered considerable interest in many fields in recent years; however, creativity and creative writing are rarely cultivated in EFL writing classrooms. This study uses a digital game and designs a creative writing project to provide an authentic learning opportunity through which students were able to develop their creativity, use the target language in a meaningful way, and enjoy learning. A murder mystery game, Her Story, was selected because it provides a springboard for creative writing due to its fragmented and ambiguous narrative. Based on the game plot, 25 Korean university students reimagined the narrative in creative writing projects of their own. The study analyzes the students’ writing according to three constructs in Torrance’s model of creativity: originality, flexibility, and elaboration. The results demonstrate how the students’ writing exhibits considerable creativity in all three constructs. Student reflection papers and surveys indicate that participating in the project enhanced the students’ motivation for and engagement in learning.

Data-driven learning (DDL; Johns, 1991), involving students’ hands-on use of corpora for self-guided language learning, is a methodology now increasingly used in many tertiary contexts to enhance the teaching of disciplinary postgraduate thesis writing. However, there are still few studies tracking students’ actual engagement with corpora for DDL. This mixed-methods study reports on the tracking of students’ corpus use via a purpose-built corpus query and data visualisation platform integrated into a large postgraduate disciplinary thesis writing program at a university in Hong Kong. Data on corpus usage history (e.g. times of access, duration of use), query syntax (e.g. query lexis/phraseology and use of wildcards and part-of-speech tags), query function (e.g. frequency lists/distribution, concordance sorting and collocation) and query filters (e.g. searches by faculty, discipline, or thesis section) were collected from 327 students spanning over 11,000 individual corpus queries. The results show significant interdisciplinary and inter-/intra-user trends and variation in the use of particular corpus functions and query syntax adopted by corpus users. Students varied in the type of knowledge (e.g. domain-specific, language-specific) they were accessing, and frequently went beyond the exemplars of the DDL course materials to generate unique queries under their own initiative. Qualitative case study data from three corpus users’ activity logs also show distinctive individual corpus engagement by query frequency and function. These data provide a clearer insight into what students actually do during DDL and the different directions and trajectories that individual users take as a result of DDL. All accompanying DDL tasks are also included as supplementary materials.

This exploratory study focuses on international students’ usage of digital tools in order to understand what role such tools play in the transition to their new academic environments and what learning opportunities they provide. Not only do digital tools accompany international students’ social, cultural, and linguistic transitions as they move to France to further their language competence, but their usage also reveals part of the social and semiotic adjustments they have to make in the process. Sixteen international students who volunteered for the study were given a smartphone application with which they could track learning opportunities by taking pictures and writing textual commentaries. The data, collected over a period of five weeks, thus include the resulting entries these participants shared in their mobile multimodal diaries with the researchers, as well as an end-of-project debriefing that was conducted to shed further light on the international students’ digital habits and their attitudes towards self-tracking. This study indicates that digital tools can play an important and pervasive role in facilitating international students’ linguistic development and their dealings with everyday life abroad. It also confirms that self-tracking apps can be instrumental in enhancing students’ awareness of learning opportunities outside the classroom.

The growing availability of mobile technologies has contributed to an increase in mobile-assisted language learning in which learners can autonomously study a second language (L2) anytime or anywhere (e.g. Kukulska-Hulme, Lee & Norris, 2017; Reinders & Benson, 2017). Research investigating the effectiveness of such study for L2 learning, however, has been limited, especially regarding large-scale commercial L2 learning apps, such as Duolingo. Although one commissioned research study found favorable language learning outcomes (Vesselinov & Grego, 2012), limited independent research has reported issues related to learner persistence, motivation, and program efficacy (Lord, 2015; Nielson, 2011). The current study investigates the semester-long learning experiences and results of nine participants learning Turkish on Duolingo. The participants showed improvement on L2 measures at the end of the study, and results indicate a positive, moderate correlation between the amount of time spent on Duolingo and learning gains. In terms of perceptions of their experiences, the participants generally viewed Duolingo’s flexibility and gamification aspects positively; however, variability in motivation to study and frustration with instructional materials were also expressed.