Beyond the paywall blogs seek to enable teachers to access more research based content which is often limited in access. If you have access, you can read this paper on MALLs here .
Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) apps offer a transformative approach to enhancing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ speaking skills. A recent study emphasizes the significance of MALL apps in promoting interactive speaking activities and self-regulation among EFL learners. As secondary teachers in England with pupils having English as a second language, integrating MALL apps can revolutionize language learning experiences.
To maximize the benefits of MALL apps, teachers should encourage students to engage with the app outside class and monitor their progress. By doing so, teachers can create a dynamic learning environment that fosters autonomy and self-directed learning habits among students. Providing training on how to effectively use the app for language learning purposes is crucial. This empowers students to leverage the app’s affordances and personalize their learning journey.
Supplementary materials play a vital role in enriching the learning process. By incorporating additional interactive speaking activities and relevant materials within the app, teachers can make learning more engaging and challenging for students. Moreover, addressing the availability of premium modes and necessary affordances within the app is essential to ensure all students have equal access to resources.
Consistency in coursebook utilization and task design is key to fostering a fair learning environment for all students. Providing equitable mediation and access to resources related to the coursebook can level the playing field and support students of varying proficiency levels. By maintaining fairness in treatment and offering additional support where needed, teachers can empower EFL learners to excel in their language learning journey.
In conclusion, the integration of MALL apps presents a wealth of opportunities for secondary teachers in England to enhance EFL learners’ speaking skills and promote autonomous learning. By embracing technology, providing training, and ensuring fairness in treatment, teachers can create a supportive environment where all students can thriv
This is an blog summarising the paper : Hwang G.-J., Rahimi M. & Fathi J., Enhancing EFL learners’ speaking skills, foreign language enjoyment, and language-specific grit utilising the affordances of a MALL app: A microgenetic perspective, Computers & Education (2024), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.105015.
The application of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) to teaching and learning premises on quite a straightforward idea: there’s an intrinsic difficulty to learning tasks, often made harder by extraneous load, whether that’s a cluttered slide deck with no dual coding or insufficient worked examples. Clean up the learning event and you can enable all pupils to access the intrinsic learning more efficiently. As the heading of standard 2 says in the Core Content Framework (CCF) for all new teachers, “How [all] Pupils Learn”. Only, it seems, that’s not how all pupils learn. Because learning something new actually takes effort to pay attention. And effort, it seems, is not the singular thing that many seem to think it is.
A new (2024) paper out has targeted this limited understanding of ‘effort’. It is open access and you can read it for yourself here. But it has implications for teachers and how we think about learning so it is important for us to look at their key findings.
The authors divide effort into three key areas.
Effort required by the complexity of the task.
The harder it is, the more effort. We know a lot about this. Not enough difficulty and we become apathetic and demotivated. Too much difficulty and we get disillusioned. This is the area CLT is focused on. Let’s enable pupils to tackle more difficult tasks by reducing the extraneous load and improving their ability to tackle things through worked examples and well designed dual coding.
Effort required to focus (including how much you are averse to focusing on it!)
The continuous focus a task demands is not related to its difficulty. You could be having to complete a large spreadsheet using very similar tasks over and over. Copy and pasting and calculating. It requires focus, but it’s not hard. In fact it’s quite boring. Boring, it seems, requires more effort. It’s painful to have to focus when something is boring. I think we can all think of examples of this one!
Motivational effort
Generally, students are ready to allocate effort if they are motivated. These can be extrinsically motivated via deferred gratification (e.g. qualifications and monetary rewards) and intrinsically motivated such as through epistemic curiosity or prior positive experiences. However, students can also not be motivated by deferred gratification. ImPact’s latest report on pupil absence suggests persistently absent pupils are less motivated by deferred gratification and that a sense of belonging could be more powerful in providing motivation.
To put this into teacher terms and get an understanding of how all 3 types affect a single task with a consistent intrinsic load, let us think about the act of marking and assessment.
To assess a work against criteria, you have to conceptually hold the entire work in your head. This can be quite difficult for longer extended writing pieces with large amounts of information. You also have to have the subject knowledge to assess it whether for subject content or for spelling and grammar. There is an innate and intrinsic difficulty to assessment (sometimes made unnecessarily harder by illegible handwriting and no quiet working space to concentrate on the marking!)
To mark work, you have to focus. That’s actually quite hard for many who have to assess. To mark for one hour takes focus and concentration. It’s tiring and sometimes you are too tired to mark. Sometimes you have to mark huge amounts like during mock examinations or when you are working as an examiner and you are grinding through endless similar answers over and over.
And that leads us to motivation. Remember the days of triple marking and multiple colour pens? Of ‘Verbal Feedback Given’ stamps? Or even today’s double and triple mock examinations where schools are trying to wring extra points out of pupils via exam practice. You might not always be that motivated to mark these. You might feel this should be outsourced (as some schools do) and that a third set of mocks is not spending your time well. You may well really dislike marking, which may be viewed as a tax on your ‘free’ time. Many polls of teachers find this one of the least liked areas of teaching. It’s no secret exam boards struggle to recruit examiners.
And so it’s not enough just to think about the difficulty of marking. You have to think about the need to focus during the act of marking and the motivation needed to do your marking. It’s why we do things like whole class feedback instead of marking whole sets of books. Marking whole sets of books with detailed annotation can require lots of effort even though it is not actually hard to do.
Now reflect on effort in your lessons – the same principles around effort applies to students. We need to think not just about the first area of effort which CLT attempts to optimise, but also the other two areas of focus and motivation. A group of trust leaders told Jon Severs of the TES that a more diverse curriculum with less content to cover (to summarise his meeting with them) might mean students can focus on English and maths more effectively because they have other subjects which they really, and I mean really, enjoy, but more importantly also make them feel part of the school and motivated to enjoy school. We have to see school not just made up of tiny episodes of teaching and learning which all pupils experience in the same way, but as a ‘whole’ school experience for a diverse range of learners who need to be able to generate the three types of effort needed to enjoy and succeed during their time in school.
Relatively recent research suggests that the ratio of autistic boys to girls is likely to be nearer three to one (Loomes et al, 2017), or even equal (Grey et al, 2021), however only one fifth of autistic girls are diagnosed before the age of 11 compared with over half of autistic boys (Belcher et al, 2022).
There are often challenges with girls being recognised as autistic which then means their needs are not recognised nor met and can lead to significant mental health issues in adolescence and into adulthood.
While there will always be exceptions, it can be suggested that the diagnostic criteria for autism are based on a ‘male presentation’ of autism (caveats, naturally) and certainly a presentation that does not involve ‘camouflaging’ or ‘masking’. Loomes et al (2017) have identified that there is a diagnostic gender bias which means girls are less likely to receive clinical diagnosis.
Girls are more likely than boys to display camouflaging or masking behaviours although some boys will also mask. They may demonstrate more desire to interact with others, may maintain some friendships and demonstrate more social, emotional and empathetic behaviours than boys, or may display behaviours perceived as shy or passive (Zakai-Mashiach, 2023). Stereotypical views of autism may be of children who cannot make eye contact, who are isolated, who have unusual and fixed interests and communication skills that demonstrate a difference in use of tone and body language. However, many girls observe and practice their social skills so they are appearing to interact like their peers, and their special interests may be age appropriate, so the intensity of these is not identified. They may well be perfectionists and high achievers who appear to be doing well academically and socially.
The resources needed to camouflage in autistic people can result in a loss of identity, internal conflict, anxiety, depression and increased risk of suicidality (Belcher et al, 2022; Howe et al, 2023). Risk of suicide is seven times higher in autistic people than non-autistic people (Howe et al, 2023) and autistic females are more likely to die by suicide than autistic males, with camouflaging being an additional risk factor in suicidality (Cassidy et al, 2018). They are also at higher risk of experiencing sexual violence (Hopkins et al, 2023). Autistic girls are more likely to underachieve academically compared with their non-autistic peers, but are less likely to get support because they internalise their difficulties (Zakai-Mashiach, 2023).
The complexities of adolescence can lead to mental health issues in non-diagnosed autistic girls, where if they are lucky, someone will consider the possibility of autism. Teachers need to be alert to the knowledge that camouflaging may mean that they have far more autistic pupils in their classes that they realise and the behaviours may look quite different in girls. Organisations such as the Autistic Girls Network (https://autisticgirlsnetwork.org/) are working hard to raise awareness of the needs of autistic girls and women and have lots of useful information on reasonable adjustments in school. Parents of autistic girls are more likely to report elevated levels of stress than parents of autistic boys (Hopkins et al, 2023), due to the mental health issues of their children, late diagnosis, needs not being met and the increased vulnerability of girls. This also has implications for how schools work in partnership with parents and enable them to feel supported.
Michelle Sogga is a Senior Tutor in Education (Early Years) and can be found on X at @msogga
Belcher, H., Morein-Zamir, S., Mandy, W., and Ford, R. (2022) ‘Camoflaging Intent, First Impressions, and Age of ASC Diagnosis in Autistic Men and Women’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52, pp. 3413-3426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05221-3
Cassidy, S., Bradley, L., Shaw, R. and Baron-Cohen, S. (2018) ‘Risk markers for suicidality in autistic adults’, Molecular Autism, 9 (42) https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-018-0226-4
Craddock, E. (2024): Raising the voices of AuDHD women and girls: exploring the co-occurring conditions of autism and ADHD, Disability & Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2023.2299342
Gray, L., Bownas, E., Hicks, L., Hutcheson-Galbraith, E., and Harrison, S. (2021) ‘Towards a better understanding of girls on the Autism spectrum: educational support and parental perspectives’, Educational Psychology in Practice, 37 (1) pp. 74-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/02667363.2020.1863188
Hopkins, N., Iles, J. and Satherley, R. (2023) ‘The Experience of Raising Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review of Qualitiative Research Studies’, Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-023-00419-w
Howe, S., Hull, L., Sedgewick, F., Hannon, B. and McMorris, C. (2023) ‘Understanding camouflaging and identity in autistic children and adolescents using photo-elicitation’, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 108
Loomes, R., Hull, L., Palmear, W. and Locke, M. (2017) ‘What is the Male-to-Female ratio in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Pyschiatry, 56 (6) pp. 466-474. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0890856717301521?via%3Dihub [Accessed 26/1/24]
Milton, D. (2012) ‘On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’, Disability and Society, 27 (6), pp. 883-887.
Mitchell, P., Sheppard, S. and Cassidy, S. (2021) ‘Autism and the double empathy problem: Implications for development and mental health’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 39 pp. 1-18
Zakai-Mashiach, M. (2023) “I Was Like a Bird Without Wings”: Autistic Women’s Retrospective Experiences in General Schools’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 53 pp. 4258-4270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05717-6
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