Supporting Non-Expert Users in Authoring Tasks for Learning Language and Culture: Evaluation Study

Introduction

Migration poses linguistic and cultural challenges to migrants and host community members at three levels: Linguistic and cultural difficulties as migrants adapt to their new lives (Hashemi et al., 2017), host community members learning about migrant languages and cultures to achieve social harmony (Sancho-Pascual, 2020), and second and third generation migrants feeling detached from their heritage culture and language (Liaqat et al., 2021). In response to these challenges, this work presents our design of a web app that fosters two-way intercultural exchange through supporting both migrant and host community members to create a digital repository of cultural activities that preserves and shares their cultures and languages¹.

We aim to address these challenges through supporting the creation of activities that promote cultural awareness and language skills development by and for migrants¹ and host communities for both intercultural and intergenerational exchange. We found only limited research examples in technology design focused venues of how to support non-expert users (i.e., those with no or limited educational, media creation, and/or technical expertise) to create their own content without expert support (e.g. in digital storytelling (Sawhney, 2009) or virtual reality (Vishwanath et al., 2019)). Most existing research in this context seems to target more specific issues. For example, teaching specific language skills using pre-prepared content (Kouri et al., 2020), understanding the experiences of immigrant youth through design thinking (Peterson Bishop & Fisher, 2015), supporting refugees in getting access to health care (Talhouk et al., 2016), or designing tools to support translation (Liebling et al., 2020). Moving beyond the context of migrants to focus on learning about culture and languages, recent literature shows an increased focus on Virtual Reality (VR) (Lawrence & Ahmed, 2018; Vishwanath et al., 2019), Augmented Reality (AR) (Fan & Antle, 2020), social robots (Kouri et al., 2020), or gaming (Culbertson et al., 2016) as mediums for learning, but again using pre-prepared content, thus limiting the scope and sustainability of such work. Hashemi et al (2017) analyzed mobile applications developed to support newly arrived Arabic Migrants focusing on language and cultural training. They found that the apps utilize traditional pedagogies, focusing on basic vocabulary training with fewer active learning activities and recommended more focus on active learning pedagogies and intercultural communication.

There is, therefore, a clear research gap in how to design technology to support non-expert users (migrant communities in our context) to create open educational resources (OERs) (Iannella & Marani, 2021) to teach others their cultures and languages. To address this gap, the provision of a sustainable and authentic repository of cultural activities, supporting the creation of educational content for cultures and languages by non-expert users, is the main design goal of this work. To ensure that the educational content is ‘open’, the cultural activities need to be accessible at no cost and used, adapted, and redistributed by others with no restrictions. To ensure engagement, the created activities need to be interactive and multimodal (Mestre, 2012; Oud, 2009; Schwan & Riempp, 2004), and to ensure educational value, they must align with current foreign language learning paradigms (Ellis, 2000; Hubbard, 2006; Nunan, 2004; Smith & González-Lloret, 2020) and trends in media use in language education (Nunan, 2004; Reyna et al., 2020). Upon designing a web app with representatives of the migrant and host communities and developing a proof-of-concept implementation, we wanted to answer the following design validation question: Is a user- and theory-informed web app able to guide non-experts in creating engaging and pedagogy-informed open educational resources to learn language and culture? In our research context, non-experts refer to users from migrant (including immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers) and host communities who have limited or no expertise in pedagogy, media creation, and/or technology.