Abstract:

Communities are important for language learners to learn and practice the language. A class of language students are analysed in terms of their mobility and how this affects the communities that they interact with. A classroom provides a sense of community for a group of students learning a language. As a part of their studies, the students are encouraged to travel to a country where the target language is spoken. We consider the class of language students as a community of language learners that gets disconnected when some of them travel abroad. We have used a mobile community blog to extend the learning arena to create and maintain a sense of community among the language learners. This paper discusses the design considerations for a mobile community blog for language learners and describes the use of a blog to support their sense of community. An evaluation and analysis of the usage of the blog is presented. These results suggest that the learners lack an identity within the community of language learners and there was no sense of community among the members. We reflect on these results from the perspective of connections among the members of the language learning community and how awareness systems can foster connectedness and a sense of community among the language learners.

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