Turn On Your Phones! Using Mobile Devices in the Classroom

Abstract

There are currently more than 7.650 billion people around the world which use more than one mobile device such as tablets or wearables. The past year, there had been more than 1.500 million smartphones sold, and there were more than 3.000 million smartphones active.  In the past decade, the increasing development of mobile technology has been unbelievably swift; from plain and simple phones to the current high-tech phones which can serve as mini-computers. In this paper we are going to examine the use of mobile devices for language learning. In particular we will consider how different apps and sites can be used to facilitate mobile language learning; the model we use is based on the belief that teachers and learners are active participants in making and shaping the knowledge, in other words, teaching and learning implies that students take responsibility for their own learning and that teachers play their part in enabling this.