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Enhance sustainability and environmental protection awareness: agency in Chinese informal video learning

  • Ting Huang ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 5, 2023
Language Learning in Higher Education
From the journal Language Learning in Higher Education Volume 13 Issue 1

Abstract

Protecting the environment is an important topic. In this study, college Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) students engaged in an agentive process of informally learning the Chinese language and culture by watching The Mermaid, a movie produced in China in 2016, which focuses on sustainability. Informal learning is recognized as one of the most powerful factors in Foreign Language (FL) development (Furlong and Davies 2012). Limited research on informal CFL learning from watching online videos is available (Huang and Lammers 2018). By using key ideas of agency, mediation, and internalization in SocioCultural Theory (SCT), this qualitative case study found that informal video learning from watching The Mermaid was helpful for learning vocabulary, grammar, and cultural values in sustainability topics. By means of semi-structured interviews, observations, recalls, and documents as data, the findings suggest that using real-world movies such as The Mermaid as an environmental sustainability topic had a positive impact on FL education. Demonstrating their agencies, learners engaged in vocabulary, grammar, and cultural value learning. This study offers pedagogical implications for language learning in Higher Education. Language Centers can therefore play a role in engaging campuses in social topics such as environmental protection.

Keywords: agency; informal learning; qualitative; sustainability; The Mermaid; video learning
Corresponding author: Ting Huang, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank editors Prof. Odette Gabaudan, Prof. Pilar Molina, Prof. Carmen Argondizzo, Prof. Gillian Mansfield, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. A special thank you to my dissertation advisor Dr. Jayne C. Lammers and the participants who made this work possible.

Appendices

Appendix A: Sample Individual Student Interview Protocol (First Round)

Introduction:

I started by saying “Thank you for your participation. Before we start, I would like to remind you again that participating in this study is completely voluntary, and you have the right to withdraw this study at any time. Now we are going to start. I will audio-record our conversation. Do you have any concerns and questions?” Then once the participants agree, the PI will confirm each participant’s name, background, proficiency level of Chinese, and pseudonym (Huang & Lammers 2018, 2023).

Part 1: In this in-depth discussion, I explore the individual participant’s experiences with informally learning Chinese from watching videos focusing on his/her past life history and learning details. We start by asking “Could you tell me your personal experience about watching The Mermaid?” I follow this prompt during the discussion if the participants were hesitant in responding: “do you have stories related to your personal interests, school, and friends related to watching videos for informally learning Chinese? In other words, how did you come to use videos for informally learning Chinese?”

Part 2: Inspired by Scollon and Colleagues (Scollon et al. 2004), I use some prompts in finding out the key mediated social actions that are essential for their informally learning Chinese from watching videos. This is a semi-structured interview. The questions are loosely structured to allow for interactions between the researcher and the interviewee. Below are some prompts to be used during the discussion:

  1. What was your attitude toward learning from The Mermaid?

  2. (If they say interested in learning) what made you interested?

  3. Did you use it intentionally or accidentally?

  4. Who did you watch The Mermaid with? What was the setting like for your video watching?

  5. Can you describe what you usually do while you are watching videos?

  6. Do you think watching videos changed you in any way in terms of learning?

Part 3: Below are questions related to learning details:

  1. What were the major challenges that you have encountered with learning Chinese through The Mermaid? What were the strategies that you used to resolve these challenges?

  2. What were the most valuable resources in helping you in learning through The Mermaid?

  3. What surprises have you had in learning Chinese social and cultural reality through videos? When did you experience these surprises?

  4. What was the most difficult part of learning social reality from watching The Mermaid?

Winding down: Anything that we haven’t discussed but you feel that you want to share? What other comments do you have about your experiences with informally learning Chinese from watching videos?

Appendix B: Sample Individual Student Interview Protocol (Second Round)

The second interview followed up on emergent questions from the proceeding interviews (within and among participants) and field notes in observations, and the first author let the participants explain the details of their learning of The Mermaid. During this process, we probed by asking questions such as “how do you feel about …” generated from field notes.

Appendix C: Sample Individual Student Interview Protocol (Third Round)

Introduction:

The third interview continued to follow up on emergent questions from the proceeding interviews and observations within and among participants. During the first two interviews when asked about details of their experiences, some students were less talkative than the other two. I needed to find new ways of interviewing. To compensate, in this third interview we asked four types of questions based on the question types suggested by Merriam (1998, p. 77, see Table 2). Consequently, I was able to solicit more details from the participants. We checked focused issues among different participants to compare and contrast the findings.

Table 2:

The four questions to explore in-depth experiences of watching The Mermaid.

Question types Question content
Question 1 Hypothetical Suppose it is my first time finding The Mermaid for learning Chinese, what would you suggest?
Question 2 Devil’s advocate Some people think videos are not as useful as books, what would you say to them?
Question 3 Ideal position What do you think the ideal situation of learning informally from videos would be like?
Question 4 Interpretative Would you say that watching The Mermaid for learning is different from what you expected?

Appendix D: Sample Individual Student Interview Protocol (Fourth Round)

Introduction:

I start by exploring their experiences from the grand- and mini-tour questions.

1. Grand- and mini-tour questions

  1. Can you reconstruct a typical process (in- or out-of-class) in your experience of informally learning Chinese through The Mermaid? Is there anything vivid, special, and meaningful to you? (Grand-tour question)

  2. Can you reconstruct a typical moment in your experience of learning Chinese through The Mermaid? Is there anything vivid, special, and meaningful to you? (Mini-tour question)

2. Reflection on the Meaning

Given what you have said about your experiences, how do you understand informally learning Chinese from watching videos?

Winding down: Anything that we haven’t discussed but you feel that you want to share? What other comments do you have about your experiences with informally learning Chinese from watching videos?

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Received: 2022-01-21
Accepted: 2023-01-25
Published Online: 2023-06-05
Published in Print: 2023-05-25

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Introduction
  3. The fascinating world of language teaching and learning varieties
  4. Research Articles
  5. Aspiring multilinguals or contented bilinguals? University students negotiating their multilingual and professional identities
  6. The (im)possibility of breaking the cycle of rippling circularities affecting Australian language education programs: a Queensland example
  7. Lernen mit LMOOCs im universitären Deutschunterricht: Entscheidungshilfen für Deutschlehrende
  8. Enhance sustainability and environmental protection awareness: agency in Chinese informal video learning
  9. Gamification and learning Spanish as a modern language: student perceptions in the university context
  10. Seeing innovation from different prisms: university students’ and instructors’ perspectives on flipping the Spanish language classroom
  11. Investigating syntactic complexity and language-related error patterns in EFL students’ writing: corpus-based and epistemic network analyses
  12. Using Google Docs for guided Academic Writing assessments: students’ perspectives
  13. Digital storytelling as practice-based participatory pedagogy for English for specific purposes
  14. Is individual competition in translator training compatible with collaborative learning? The case of the MTIE Translation Award
  15. Tackling the elephant in the language classroom: introducing machine translation literacy in a Swiss language centre
  16. Institutionalised autonomisation of language learning in a French language centre
  17. The story of becoming an autonomous learner: a case study of a student’s learning management
  18. The effect of collaborative activities on tertiary-level EFL students’ learner autonomy in the Turkish context
  19. Learner autonomy and English achievement in Chinese EFL undergraduates: the mediating role of ambiguity tolerance and foreign language classroom anxiety
  20. Activity Reports
  21. Lehre am Sprachenzentrum der UZH und der ETH Zürich: Positionspapier
  22. Communication course for future engineers – effective data presentation and its interpretation during LSP courses
  23. Dialogic co-creation in English language teaching and learning: a personal experience
https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2023-2005
Keywords for this article
agency; informal learning; qualitative; sustainability; The Mermaid; video learning

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Introduction
  3. The fascinating world of language teaching and learning varieties
  4. Research Articles
  5. Aspiring multilinguals or contented bilinguals? University students negotiating their multilingual and professional identities
  6. The (im)possibility of breaking the cycle of rippling circularities affecting Australian language education programs: a Queensland example
  7. Lernen mit LMOOCs im universitären Deutschunterricht: Entscheidungshilfen für Deutschlehrende
  8. Enhance sustainability and environmental protection awareness: agency in Chinese informal video learning
  9. Gamification and learning Spanish as a modern language: student perceptions in the university context
  10. Seeing innovation from different prisms: university students’ and instructors’ perspectives on flipping the Spanish language classroom
  11. Investigating syntactic complexity and language-related error patterns in EFL students’ writing: corpus-based and epistemic network analyses
  12. Using Google Docs for guided Academic Writing assessments: students’ perspectives
  13. Digital storytelling as practice-based participatory pedagogy for English for specific purposes
  14. Is individual competition in translator training compatible with collaborative learning? The case of the MTIE Translation Award
  15. Tackling the elephant in the language classroom: introducing machine translation literacy in a Swiss language centre
  16. Institutionalised autonomisation of language learning in a French language centre
  17. The story of becoming an autonomous learner: a case study of a student’s learning management
  18. The effect of collaborative activities on tertiary-level EFL students’ learner autonomy in the Turkish context
  19. Learner autonomy and English achievement in Chinese EFL undergraduates: the mediating role of ambiguity tolerance and foreign language classroom anxiety
  20. Activity Reports
  21. Lehre am Sprachenzentrum der UZH und der ETH Zürich: Positionspapier
  22. Communication course for future engineers – effective data presentation and its interpretation during LSP courses
  23. Dialogic co-creation in English language teaching and learning: a personal experience
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