Social media and Interculturality in language education

Responsables Fred Dervin (Turku)

Christine Develotte (INRP)

(With Anthippi Potolia (INALCO), Emily Gao (University of Turku), Nora Laakso (University of Turku) and Turku doctoral student for deliverable 1, Laure Endrizzi (INRP) for deliverable 2)

Three extra deliverables have been designed and proposed for inclusion in our LS6 Network. Though they differ in contents, they are quite complementary in helping us how to understand what social media are and in what ways they can help us improve our understanding of intercultural issues in language learning.

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WEBINAR

Deliverable 1: a webinar (a public discussion broadcast live) on June 29^th, 2011. The speakers (Prof. Fred Dervin and Prof. Christine Develotte) discuss publicly the topic: Give interculturality a chance - Can social media make a difference?

The 1h30 discussion has been recorded and is available here. (please allow some minutes for video to load).

A poster of the webinar can be found here

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PUBLICATION

Deliverable 2: a publication entitled “Clarifying the concept of Social media: a comparison of media discourse in England, Finland, France and Greece”.  

The aims of this deliverable are: 1. To examine the birth/emergence of media interests in various aspects social networking by looking at key entries such as Twitter, Facebook, Second Life…; when did these appear in the media? Did people seem to lose their interests in them? Etc. 2. To look at the diachronic thematic treatment of social networking (and check how the language learning and teaching entry is dealt with); 3. To analyse and compare discourses on social media (representations) intranationally (national/regional newspaper) and between three countries (England, Finland and France). 4. To explore potential links to language education.

The project concentrates on the press and compares newspapers in England, Finland and France. Our corpus is based on free newspapers such as Metro Finland, Metro (UK), 20 Minutes, Direct Matin… but also on selected daily newspapers (Helsingin Sanomat, Huvudstatsbladet, le Figaro, The Guardian). We shall consider first and foremost the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010 where it seemed that discussion around Social Networking was strong. Discussion on Social networking during autumn 2010 might also be collected.

The results will be published in a journal in French and possibly in English and help us to boost our understanding and definition of social networking.

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PUBLICATION

Deliverable 3; a publication about “Intercultural education and social media”. Inspired by the INRP’s VST newsletters and states of the art documents (cf. http://www.inrp.fr/vst/LettreVST/SommaireLettre.htm), we shall look at how social media are used for boosting and working on intercultural education in formal and informal language learning contexts. This deliverable will thus consist in identifying published, unpublished research as well as experiments that deal with the issue of interculturality. The topic has been chosen as it is very close (see synonymous?) to social inclusion in contexts such as immigration, expatriation, mobility… The period of 2005-2010 will be examined (journals, monographs, teachers’ blogs…). A VST state of the art document will be produced for publication online in English and French (publication in early Autumn).