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Crossing boundaries in Facebook: Students’ framing of language learning activities as extended spaces

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Abstract

Young people’s interaction online is rapidly increasing, which enables new spaces for communication; the impact on learning, however, is not yet acknowledged in education. The aim of this exploratory case study is to scrutinize how students frame their interaction in social networking sites (SNS) in school practices and what that implies for educational language teaching and learning practices. Analytically, the study departs from a sociocultural perspective on learning, and adopts conceptual distinctions of frame analysis. The results based on ethnographic data from a Facebook group in English-learning classes, with 60 students aged between 13 and 16 from Colombia, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan indicate that there is a possibility for boundary crossing, which could generate extended spaces for collaborative language-learning activities in educational contexts where students combine their school subject of learning language and their communicative use of language in their everyday life. Such extended spaces are, however, difficult to maintain and have to be recurrently negotiated. To take advantage of young people’s various dynamic communicative uses of language in their everyday life in social media, the implementation of such media for educational purposes has to be deliberately, collaboratively and dynamically negotiated by educators and students to form a new language-learning space with its own potentials and constraints.

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Notes

  1. The first 18 postings do not get any comments at all.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported here was funded by Marcus and Amelia Foundation and conducted within the University of Gothenburg Learning and Media Technology Studio (LETStudio), and the Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS). We wish to convey our thanks to the anonymous reviewers and Gerry Stahl for their invaluable comments on a former version of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, Communication and Learning, The Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication (LinCS), The University of Gothenburg Learning and Media Technology Studio (LETStudio), University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Annika Lantz-Andersson & Sylvi Vigmo

  2. Faculty of Arts, Department of Languages and Literatures, The University of Gothenburg Learning and Media Technology Studio (LETStudio), University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Rhonwen Bowen

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  1. Annika Lantz-Andersson
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  2. Sylvi Vigmo
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  3. Rhonwen Bowen
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Correspondence to Annika Lantz-Andersson.

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Lantz-Andersson, A., Vigmo, S. & Bowen, R. Crossing boundaries in Facebook: Students’ framing of language learning activities as extended spaces. Computer Supported Learning 8, 293–312 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-013-9177-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-013-9177-0

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