The ten complete surveys were all valid for data analysis. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected, together with the instructors’ observation throughout the course. With the other factors remaining the same, the only difference for the two rounds is the course requirement on WeChat participation. Compared with the learning performances of the two rounds of research, we see that students’ learning outcomes have been effectively improved in terms of formative assessment, and learning motivations have been maintained with the interference of compulsory WeChat usage requirement. Both rounds demonstrated that WeChat was beneficial to language retention, social bonding, and providing feedback to the learners. In the following chapters, research questions will be answered and analyzed.
Learning motivations
This question was designed to investigate the students’ learning motives and outlooks. The major types of motivation for learning are intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within the student or from factors inherent in the task being performed, while extrinsic motivation comes from sources external to the student and the task, such as praise, recognition, or a system of rewards (Ryan and Deci
2000). As teachers, we hope to promote intrinsic motivation in our students as it encourages life-long learning. While many children are driven by external motivators - such as punishment if they get bad grades or rewards if they get good grades – adults are more internally motivated. Adults tend to be more self-directed, internally motivated, and ready to learn. Teachers can draw on concepts of andragogy to increase the effectiveness of their adult education classes (Knowles
1973).
According to Table
1, the degree of motivation for the students learning Chinese is generally high. 60% of them considered making Chinese friends as the first motive, followed by experiencing Chinese culture and becoming interested in the Chinese language (Table
2). The results imply that the students were driven mostly by internal factors, and they were ready to communicate and learn.
Table 1
Students’ Learning Motivation for the Chinese Language
Overall Motivation | 3 | 5 | 4.60 | 0.70 |
Round Two (P1-P6) | 3 | 5 | 4.50 | 0.84 |
Round One (P7 – P10) | 4 | 5 | 4.75 | 0.50 |
Table 2
Motivational Reasons
Friends | 6 |
Culture | 4 |
Language | 3 |
It is worth noticing that although the statistics of learning motivation in Round One is higher than that of Round Two, the participation of the Round One students learning Chinese language decreased more toward the end of the program, while the second-round students had better maintained their performances. The only difference is that Round Two students’ WeChat participation of Chinese language was monitored and accounted for in the course. Comparing the performances of the students in the two rounds, we can see intrinsic motivation may be necessary at the start, to prompt them to come to China, while the extrinsic motivation from the teachers plays an essential role in their latter weeks of language learning. Take P4 in the Second Round as an example: this student’s motivation was the only one as low as 3. However, despite 1 week without posting in the middle of the term, P4 produced highly qualitative and informative posts after the teachers’ feedback. The details of this participant’s attitude change will be explained in the third research question.
At the end of the semester, the researcher interviewed the students on their specific motivational reasons. Students expressed general curiosity and interest in China. Some students demonstrated more thinking: “It (Chinese language) may become an important trait in the world of business (P7).” and “(I learn Chinese is) to be able to make friends easier, because the Chinese students are too shy to speak to us in English (P10).”. These understandings were elicited by close observation and personal experience, which immersion learning provides (Lou and Yang
2011). Compared with the research designs of Jiang and Li (
2018), Luo and Yang (
2016), and Jin (
2017), this study was a well-rounded immersion learning. Students not only learned from the classroom, but also extensively experienced a different living environment via online communication. In this case, WeChat plays an essential role in connecting life and learning. It can be seen that such learning provides actual interactions and social situations that lead learners to communicate and think beyond learning. Overall, the students showed on average high intrinsic motivation, and this would be taken into consideration in analyzing the learning effectiveness below.
Research question 1: efficiency
The present study considers the efficiency from two aspects – learning outcomes and the survey of learners’ perception of the WeChat-based pedagogy. The learning outcomes are comprised of formative assessment and summative assessment. Below is the statistical analysis of participants’ learning outcomes (Table
3).
Table 3
Participants’ Learning Outcomes
Round Two | 92 | 1.83 | 85 | 9.35 | 89 | 5.30 |
Round One | 85 | 8.72 | 83 | 13.64 | 84 | 5.58 |
Although the learning motivation results (Table
1) suggested that Round One surpassed Round Two, the learning outcomes showed the opposite, which was in accordance with the observation of their class performance. The course grades of the two rounds are generally the same with Round Two’s slightly better than that of Round One’s. While the differences in the course grade are not significant, the Standard Deviation of the formative assessment indicates the performance of Round Two students is significantly better than that of the First Round, and the SD of the summative assessment of the Second Round is better than that in the First Round as well. In short, the learning outcomes were generally at the same level, with Round Two significantly or insignificantly better in the formative and summative assessment respectively.
While the learning outcomes of the participants provide a general picture of the learners’ learning effectiveness under the setting, the survey offers a more detailed and specific description of their learning with WeChat. To see how they perceived this WeChat-based learning experience, the items of “Please rate your overall experience with the WeChat-based teaching and the learning method” were designed. It turned out the learners had a positive experience in using WeChat to learn Chinese (M = 3.90, SD = 0.88) (Table
4) and recognized that learning with WeChat was productive and effective (Table
4).
Table 4
The overall perception of WeChat’s productivity in Learning Chinese
Overall perception | 2 | 5 | 3.90 | 0.88 |
Round Two (P1-P6) | 2 | 5 | 3.83 | 0.98 |
Round One (P7-P10) | 3 | 5 | 4.00 | 0.82 |
The SD for the Second Round is slightly higher than the first. It was due to the lowest 2 points from P3. However, while P3 gave the lowest score of 2 on WeChat helpfulness, he was active in social activities, eager to communicate and posted the third-highest posts during his stay. Examining his posts and interview answers, we see that his WeChat use was focused on entertainment rather than the language application, and therefore, he benefited more from social bonding rather than language learning.
To understand how WeChat would be conducive to students’ learning, the researcher designed an evaluation of the aspects of WeChat helpfulness. The students gave credits to the different functions of WeChat (Table
5). Applying knowledge into practice by writing, listening, speaking out, posting, and reading was the most useful WeChat function, while submitting homework was the least. The functions of keeping contact, reviewing class content, sharing thoughts, and recording life were also approved by learners. From the results, we can see the students’ usage of WeChat is interaction-oriented and language-based.
Table 5
Ways that WeChat Helps Chinese Learning
Applying knowledge into practice | 7 |
Keeping contact with friends | 6 |
Reviewing class content | 6 |
Sharing thoughts | 5 |
Recording Chinese life for oneself | 5 |
Posting homework | 3 |
Apart from its various functions that aid language learning, WeChat is also rich in the language material from the Moments threads and posts, which could provide students with a variety of linguistic input to satisfy different interests and needs, and thus stimulate output. P1 and P5 stated that they were especially interested in the posts about Chinese poetry, while P3 and P4 enjoyed the weekly posts most with the videos of their homework. P2, P4, P7, P8, and P10 declared that the posts of the field trips were the most impressive, and the Chinese vocabulary in the posts was practical. P8 mentioned particularly he felt excited to learn to talk about things that related to him, like drinking beer. He learned the Chinese ‘gan bei’ for ‘bottom-up’ in English in class. On that day, he posted a thread entitled “gan bei” on his Moments with a picture of his sharing beers with his Chinese friends. Another time, students P7 and P8 proudly told the teacher that they used the vocabulary to order food, using “zhè gè” (Chinese for “this”) and “nà gè” (Chinese for “that”). That is a case where learners consciously applied knowledge into practice, and the sense of achievement was beneficial to their continuous learning.
However, students’ Chinese language output was neither persistent nor purposeful. It appears that the learners did not intentionally or systematically apply the class content into usage when chatting with their Chinese friends on WeChat, especially in Round One. This phenomenon may result from an absence in language learning awareness.
Therefore, based on the students’ performance in Round One, posting Chinese threads was made compulsory in Round Two. As part of the research, students’ posts were intentionally integrated into class content to stimulate the reconstruction of knowledge. In preparing the lessons, the teachers put the pictures and texts of students’ postings into the handouts, presentations, sentence examples, and situational dialogues so as to give positive feedback to their engagement on WeChat, encourage language output, and enhance their extrinsic motivation. Learners reported that learning with personal experience was educational and inspirational. Based on the classroom performance and learning results in both rounds, the Second Round of the WeChat-based learning research is substantially more efficient than the First Round with more purposeful language implementation on WeChat. By introducing the materials outside the classroom, the teachers related personal life to language learning, applying the Connectivism theory to bridge the divide between learners’ life and classroom learning. This paper further analyzed how WeChat helped students learn the language in question two, and detailed postings are provided.
Research question 2: benefits
With its multiple functions, WeChat is beneficial to the learner’s language learning in several ways, such as linguistic gain, interactive convenience, feedback immediacy, and especially translation friendly to language learners of elementary level. Below, this paper analyzes the benefits in the aspects mentioned above.
Firstly, WeChat enables the learners to apply and learn Chinese language either consciously or unconsciously. In the First Round, there was no requirement for P7-P10 to post Chinese texts. It turns out that students were showing a decline in the participation in either language class activities or WeChat online interactions, with either teacher or their friend. In contrast, the Second Round included WeChat usage as mandatory in the course syllabus. The students were required to post moments in Chinese at least once a week, while the instructors monitored and took records of their posting. These were accounted for 10% of the Chinese course.
Table
6 shows the statistics of total postings and Chinese posts proportion in the Second Round. Since most of learners’ WeChat friends were Chinese students from Spoken English classes, their postings were mostly targeted to such a cohort of the audience. Therefore, their posting languages choice, Chinese or English, implies their attitudes to language and communication.
Table 6
The Chinese Posts Analysis
Round Two | P1 | 21 | 17 | 80.95% |
P2 | 30 | 8 | 26.67% |
P3 | 33 | 11 | 33.33% |
P4 | 14 | 12 | 85.71% |
P5 | 60 | 19 | 31.67% |
P6 | 100 | 14 | 14.00% |
Round One | P7 | 8 | 0 | 0.00% |
P8 | 15 | 3 | 20.00% |
P9 | 23 | 1 | 4.35% |
P10 | 31 | 1 | 3.23% |
| | | Mean | 29.99% |
It is clear that students P1 - P6 generally have used WeChat more frequently, and the proportion of applying Chinese in the Second Round’s posts is higher than P7 - P10’s in the First Round. In the interview, students were asked about their posting experience with WeChat. P1 stated that with the moments of other Chinese students, he could see how native speakers made sentences with words he has learned. P4 indicated that WeChat posting was helpful to recognize characters. P6 said that with the translation function, he could read Chinese friends’ Moments easily and communicate with them freely.
Studying the posting behavior, we see that P1 posted an average amount of posts with a relatively high proportion in Chinese. Noticeably, his English posts were all released in the first month since his arrival, and then he started to use Chinese for the rest. P2 and P3 had posted about 30 Moments respectively, each with a third in Chinese. P4 posted the second least Moments, just about the required amount, while the proportion of his Chinese posts proportion was the highest, followed by P1. His only two posts in English were about bidding his farewell and wishing a happy Christmas. P6 posted the most moments, while P5 followed. Although P6’s overall proportion of Chinese posts was relatively small, the theme and Chinese linguistic features of his posts were expanded and improved with time. That is to say, apart from scheduled in-class learning, their language usage was influenced by their extracurricular activities.
To see clearly how the learners developed Chinese linguistic abilities, we take P1 as an example (Table
7) to examine his linguistic improvement.
Table 7
The Chinese posts on P1’s WeChat moments
1 | September | Women shi ai er lan ren | We are the Irish people. |
2 | Ni shi Bolan ren. Ni hen hao | You are Polish. You are very good. |
3 | Ni shi Mickey Mouse. aShi ni hao ma? | You are Mickey Mouse. How are you? |
4 | English Post No.1 | |
5 | English Post No.2 | |
6 | English Post No.3 | |
7 | jiu bai jiu shi jiu | Nine hundred and ninety-nine |
8 | aWo yao si shui jiao “I want four sleep” | I want four dumplings. |
9 | ashénɡ rì kuài lè Huang Laoshi | Happy birthday, teacher Huang. |
10 | October | English Post No.4 | |
11 | 我们a系换吃蛋糕 | We like to eat cake. |
12 | 黄老师, 他是谁? | Teacher Huang, who is he? |
13 | November | 我喜欢中国画 | I like Chinese paintings. |
14 | 柯博很可怕 | Kebo is very scary. |
15 | 您身体好吗?快点好起来吧 | Are you feeling all right? Get better soon. |
16 | 君莫笑我星期四很累 | Do not laugh. I am very tired on Thursday. |
17 | a我是坏的手机, 但是上课一下儿 | I am a bad phone but going to class for a while. |
18 | December | 採菊東籬下 | (quoting poems in traditional Chinese) Picking Chrysanthemum at the Eastern Fence |
19 | 在中国的最后一天, 我会想你的 | The last day in China. I will miss you. |
20 | 直到下一次 | Until next time. |
21 | a它开始的觉得圣诞 | It starts to feel Christmas. |
Analyzing his posts linguistically, we can see that from September to December, P1 posted 21 Moments with 17 in Chinese. The linguistic features can be observed to be developing along over time. Morphologically, the language of his posting begins with pinyin without tones (the official Romanization system for Chinese), and changes to pinyin-English combination, to pinyin with tones, and to only Chinese characters (simplified and traditional). Along with this improvement, he increased his vocabulary variety, grammar accuracy, and genre types. Not until post No.7, did he post anything besides class content in pinyin- with or without tones and random characters. After post No.8, he began to integrate his life into the postings. From post No.9, the pinyins were complete with tones, but there were some phonetic errors. In addition, P1’s Chinese character vocabulary was advancing in the process. By the error analysis, the researcher detected the morphological error in post No. 11, and the syntactic errors in posts No.17 and No.21. The result demonstrated that the error types had been changed from morphologically to syntactically. That is to say, his Chinese progressed. Moreover, in post No.16, he performed a classical style of Chinese writing – using a classical reference in the second person pronoun rather than ‘you’ - and in No.18, he posted a famous line of a poem in traditional Chinese characters. These phenomena indicated that P1 learned Chinese on his own, attempting to express his ideas about Chinese and interact more with his Chinese friends in the aspects of Chinese language and culture.
Other students, such as P4, P5, and P6, also showed evident progress in Chinese usage. By analyzing the content of their Chinese postings, there was a leap from the classroom content to self-expression 4 weeks after they arrived in China, around the end of September, just like P1. Also, this study observed self-learning output surge after 10 weeks’ study, around the beginning of November, since all participants posts texts with vocabularies outside of the textbook on WeChat. The phenomena of group behavior imply that the language input may suffice in assisting a radical improvement in the language output after a process of systematic immersion learning. Despite that the early results may look cautiously promising, much more work is required in the future.
Apart from linguistic advancement, WeChat has created a friendly and convenient communication environment for the learners as well as a platform for the language application. Students stated that they made more than 100 friends on WeChat at the end of this program, with 10% of the friends maintaining constant contact, communicating bilingually. Some learners said the Chinese students would teach them Chinese words and phrases, which the learners would bring to the Chinese class for further learning and discussion. With the help of the translation function in WeChat, the learners would understand their Chinese peers when the language was above their levels or vice versa. This function helps to reduce learning anxiety and encourages interactions at the same time (Krashen
1982,
1985). The learners not only made friends while on campus, but they also built up a long-term relationship with their Chinese friends and teachers after they returned to Ireland. At the end of the programs, the learners P1 to P10 all stated they would continue to use WeChat after they left China. In the following months after the First Round, P7 posted a thread as late as May 2018, a half year later. Similarly, after the Second Round P6 regularly returned to WeChat to post texts and pictures messages in English or Chinese more than 12 times over the next 7 months. According to the previous research, although young students are mostly addicted to the smartphone, their consistent attention on a typical app is rare with the rapid shift round the clock (Vacaru et al.
2014). In conclusion, it is obvious WeChat has proved to be a reliable and effective bonding tool, connecting the Chinese to international students, and therefore helped strengthen the learners’ language retention and build a life-long learning habit and friendship.
The last point is the function of timely feedback in WeChat’s Messaging. A widely cited article contends that assessment for learning would provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which teachers and students are engaged (Black and Wiliam
2010). As teachers check on understanding, they adjust their instruction to keep students on track. Likewise, the students can identify the strengths and weaknesses in their own work, reflect back and on progress, and determine what to do next (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick
2006). It is evident that quick feedback plays a vital role in learning. As social media software, WeChat enables instantaneous communication for users, which proves efficient language learning. The teachers encouraged interactions on WeChat. When students post their homework via WeChat in forms of pictures, audio or text, the teachers will give specific feedback on the performance of the work in different forms to stimulate a comprehensive development in language learning. Furthermore, the teachers could monitor the group chat and students’ moment sharing and respond to their texts and questions within 24 h. That means the group interactions occurred at least three times a week regardless of one-on-one Q&A, in contrast to their home university’s teacher-student relations in which students have no or few chances talking to their professors on Blackboard, Moodle or other equivalent university platforms. In short, the teacher-student communication on WeChat is productive and functional. The other advantages, such as authentic linguistic resources, multimedia material storage, and the course management platform have also proven to be beneficial to language learning (Luo and Yang
2016).
From the data and observation above, we see that WeChat supports language learning in aspects of authentic language contact, close social bonding, and quick feedback. Its multiple language translation function provides a cushion for language beginners in the immersion program and enables them to switch between languages to adapt to a different language environment. These advantages of WeChat enhanced students’ learning and resulted in a better performance in the formative assessment in Round Two compared to Round One.
Research question 3: disadvantages and improvements
While the benefits of using WeChat are easy to recognize, the disadvantages of applying WeChat in elementary CFL should also be examined. Its strength of flexibility, multifunction, and information abundance as a social media platform could also be its drawbacks of informality, distraction, and information overload for learning.
What is more, if the learners are not social people themselves or tend to decline social media in the first place, they may not be active in using the language to communicate online, in this case, using WeChat. Using P4 as an example (Table
6), we can see his postings were few, and according to his self-report, he did not own any other social media account. His preference for social network indicated that he might not be a good fit in this research setting. During the course, the instructor had closely monitored all the learners’ Chinese postings and especially reminded P4 three times of being late in posting the Chinese homework. In contrast to his low vitality in postings, the quality of his Chinese posting is relatively high. It could be detected that his Chinese level has been advanced since he started to use more vocabulary, sentence structures, and manner of speaking in the sentences. His behavior, in this case, echoes his intrinsic low learning motivation but also reflects his interest in Chinese culture and people motivation. When the instructor interviewed him about the change, he shared his new strategy on learning Chinese. He stated that in order to urge himself to interact more on WeChat, he assigned English homework submitted via WeChat for the Chinese students in his spoken English classes. As a result, he combined his work and learning on WeChat, stimulated self-learning motivation, and successfully adapted himself to it by changing his attitude toward this social media-based learning method. It turned out this way of learning was more practical and convenient for a slow learner like him, so as he could learn at his own pace. This incidence indicates the importance of initiative of the learners’ initiative to be proactive and cooperative in language learning on social media.
Except for individual preference to social interaction, WeChat’s pros could be its cons in certain areas. Since WeChat is a chatting app, it is informal and convenient. People can talk to each other readily. The ideal would be that language learners practice and learn from each other through chat. That is, the Chinese students would practice English with the Irish students, and Irish students would practice Chinese. However, according to the observation and the interview, usually their conversations would end up in English since the Chinese students speak English faster than the language learners’ Chinese. Even though the learners speak in Chinese, the speed of information flow in conversations would impel them to choose a faster way to respond instead of taking time in finding the right Chinese words.
Similarly, Li (
2018) also stated that without teachers’ formal instruction on language practice, students would less likely apply the language on purpose outside the classroom or only confine their language knowledge only to class content or requirements, as demonstrated in the First Round of the present study (Table
6, P7-P10). If the role of teacher or timely feedback is lacking, the learners would easily stray because of distractions on social media, and the connection between learning and using would be uncertain. Thus, it would be difficult for learners to improve their language abilities. Knowledge is not truly acquired, and the relationship between the language and life is disconnected, which leads to low efficiency.
According to the theory, the Connectivism theory serves as a stimulator and a connection between real life and the class contents (Downes
2012; Siemens
2005). In the present study, this connection proves to be a promising role in linguistic acquisition. Evidence can be seen in the learners’ linguistic gain (Table
6) and P1’s posting example (Table
7). Their postings were mostly derived from their lives and classroom content. When learners were interviewed on the experience of WeChat-based learning, they expressed that WeChat lightened the pressure of learning such a complicated language and inspired them to speak more in Chinese. For example, P3 says, “(WeChat helps me learn Chinese) … By learning Chinese that you use every day - e.g., ordering food.”
Taking the above analysis into consideration, we see that this learning method’s advantages outweigh the disadvantages in terms of the learning motivation and the language application as well as the life-long learning attitude and material reconstruction. At the same time, improvements could still be made to counteract the method’s drawbacks and enhance its strength. Below are the three aspects of improvement suggestions in WeChat-based learning.
Firstly, enhancing the correlation between the language course and learners’ WeChat use: The results show that some students did not intentionally pay attention to the language in life and produced less Chinese in WeChat communication. The phenomena could be improved by teachers’ giving more specific instructions on WeChat usage. For example, teachers could spare the last 3 min of class for students to post “What I have learned today” before leaving. Likewise, to increase language input and output, teachers could require students to read the weekly posts and leave comments in Chinese or pinyin. Such activities should be graded in the performative assessment. Furthermore, teachers could assign topics for the weekly homework to urge students to produce themed posts, and in return, it would be applicable for the teachers to examine students’ linguistic gain in a more controlled way.
Secondly, the language choice: In the interaction with Chinese peers, the teachers could advise the learners to interact with their Chinese friends bilingually, or in a combination of Chinese and English, and also learners to ask their native friends to speak in Chinese more often or bilingually. Also, the learners could conduct small semi-bilingual videos with native speakers on WeChat as a final project in the course, which should be set advance in the course syllabus.
Thirdly, maintaining and stimulating intrinsic and extrinsic learning motivations: Usually, students would be more active in learning the language at the beginning of the learning and post more threads when in a new environment than following periods when things got familiar (Table
4), or the language difficulty increased. For instance, the first month saw the most Moments posted by P1, while the middle of the term observed zero posts from P4 for a week. To regenerate their interest, the teachers could apply PBL (Problem-based Learning) strategy to set up real-life problems for students to solve. For example, buying a souvenir. This task would involve vocabulary preparation and phonetic, syntactic, or pragmatic practice of interactions. Thus, with various real-life problems, students could be proactive to preview new vocabulary and practice on-site dialogues. What is more, since the learners are exchange students seeking life exploring and culture immersion, activities on culture shock between their home country and China would also be a trigger for language practice. Additionally, comparing their native language to Chinese would also provide more in-depth insights into Chinese learning.