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With an extensive range of information available at the swipe of a finger, the smartphone has become a ubiquitous tool for augmenting conversation. Users of English as a lingua franca (ELF) often rely on such technology to help establish friendships by using them to sustain intersubjectivity. But how do they manage the multiple involvements this entails, such as participating in current talk while searching for linguistic items?

This study employs multimodal Conversation Analysis to undertake a detailed account of the way two young people, a Japanese male (22) and an Indonesian male (16) incorporate smartphones into their lingua franca English interaction. The analysis is based on naturally occurring conversations video-recorded by the Japanese participant, while both boys were living with an American homestay family.

The analysis explores the role of the smartphone in forward-oriented repair, including how the interactants, look up unfamiliar words, delay turn progressivity to fit those words into the turn-in-progress, and use images to accompany an unclear term. Speakers also occasionally abandon a look-up in order to reformulate the turn without the smartphone, relying instead on their own interactional competence.

The study offers insight into the way young people use smartphones as an affordance to manage and repair aspects of their L2 talk, enabling them to enhance their current interactional competence by drawing on the vast range of semiotic resources the phone possesses. Ensuring understanding is essential for developing and maintaining friendships, and for this particular peer culture of lingua franca English speakers, smartphones are a key tool for accomplishing that. As such, the study will be of interest to researchers and educators in the fields of both technology and interaction.

As the center of the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence (AI) has marked its presence in various disciplines including the education field in the form of AI-powered learning applications. The purpose of this study is to build a research model capturing the relationships among use contexts, user gratification, attitude, learning performance and continuous intention to use an AI-powered English learning application.

Using the use and gratification theory, use contexts and the belief-attitude-intention theory, this paper uses a quantitative approach based on a survey method for data collection and structural equation modeling for analysis. A total of 478 students from an international university in Guangdong, China, participated in the survey after using Liulishuo for two weeks.

The results showed that perceived use contexts affected all variables associated with gratifications-obtained and gratification-opportunities. With the exception of social integrativeness, all other gratification-based factors significantly affected attitude. The attitude in turn significantly influenced learning performance and continuous use intention.

Mobile AI-powered learning applications are at the center of research on technology-enhanced learning in the age of media and technology convergence. The study is timely and contributes to the discussion of the roles of use context and gratifications on technology users’ attitudes and behavioral intentions.

In this chapter, we discuss initiatives that aim to improve children’s literacy in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries through m-learning. These projects, predominantly introduced by governments and international aid organisations, often involve the provision of e-books and apps including game-based apps, to be used either inside or outside school. In some cases, lesson plans and content for teachers in poorly resourced schools are also delivered via mobile devices. After a general overview, we briefly describe a selection of projects with reference to m-learning and literacy theory and research. It is indicated in this chapter that the use of mobile devices to improve literacy opportunities for children in LMI countries has a great deal of potential but that, in many cases, there are limitations in pedagogical design and implementation practices, not to mention restricted views of what literacy is and might be for children in these locations.

The subject area is strategy and business.

The case can be used for MBA students. This is equally effective in short courses meant for low-to-mid-level working executives. The case is suited for classes in strategy, general marketing, media management and family business courses.

Dainik Jagran – a vernacular daily – is the most read newspaper in India. Under the banner of Jagran Prakashan Ltd.; which is one of the leading media houses in India, the success of Dainik Jagran has been an outcome of the strategic marketing decisions taken by its founder and his successors in the post-independence era. With extensive circulation, it created a large readership base and took bold decisions to launch multi editions to its daily through a series of acquisitions, mergers and consolidations from 1975 to 2010, enabling it to step into product diversification. Readership surveys, investments in technology, advertising, regular branding events and smart phone applications are a few tools that helped. While the group has diversified into other industries, there is an underlying anxiety about the future prospects of its newspaper business. With the onslaught of online news dailies, will Dainik Jagran be able to expand and maintain its readership base using its previous business and marketing strategies? Or is it time to change strategies for businesses in the newspaper and allied media industry in India?

The study has the following outcomes: application of value chain concept in businesses serving two-sided markets; application of environmental analysis, Porter’s five forces analysis and related strategy concepts; and learning to critically approach and develop a sustainable growth strategy framework for a successful family-run newspaper business in India.

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CSS 11: Strategy.

With the widespread use of technology, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has recently gained a vital momentum as it improves communication competence in an authentic, real-life learning environment. Therefore, the current chapter presents a discussion of the humanization of English language teaching (ELT) by using CALL tools in a higher education institution. Sixteen Turkish students who were studying in the preparatory class in a Turkish state university were included in the study. The research was designed focusing on a qualitative research method. Joint interviewing was conducted at the beginning and end of the academic year, 2018–2019. The interview questions were asked about their perceptions of learning via CALL in the classroom. The findings from the first and second interviews were compared and analyzed according to what they thought and how they were affected. The empirical data presented in this chapter explicated students’ views on the humanization of ELT through CALL in Turkish tertiary English preparatory classes. Ultimately, this chapter sets the grounds for students, teachers, higher education institutions and designers to consider the possible effects of CALL to enhance the humanization of ELT.

This study aims to investigate multilingual representation on public signs in the High City tourist destination in Abha, Saudi Arabia. It also reveals the linguistic strategies used in such representation.

This exploratory qualitative study used purposive sampling to analyze bottom-up public signs collected from the target tourist destination. A preliminary analysis was conducted for a more in-depth qualitative analysis of every sign. An Excel database was used to provide a general description and a preliminary reading of the strategies before using an in-depth analysis of every sign.

The study revealed that monolingualism (Arabic or English) and bilingualism (Arabic and English) represented the High City as a tourist destination where the signs served information and symbolic functions. No single multilingual sign was found. Certain linguistic strategies were used on the public signs, including politeness, transliteration, hybrid representation, personification and fragmentary. Some tourist-oriented strategies, such as the crisis communication strategy, are still missing.

These findings indicate that this tourist destination still targets local and regional visitors, and its linguistic landscape (LL) needs further consideration in terms of internationalization and targeting international visitors. This study implies that bilingual Arabic and English tourist destinations are potential domains for translation students and English language learners.

This study has focused on the LL of a newly established tourist destination in Saudi Arabia. It has shed light on the nuanced representations and strategies used through public signage. It contributes to understanding how linguistic elements can shape tourists’ perceptions and experiences.

Most educational institutions worldwide have suddenly switched to online instruction due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and English language teaching took its part in this transition. The immediate transition from face-to-face to fully online instruction affects its effective implementation, especially in developing countries like Ethiopia where online learning is in its early stage. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to investigate postgraduate EFL students’ perceptions and practices of online learning.

This study uses a descriptive survey design. Using simple random sampling, 91 postgraduate EFL students were selected from four universities. Online questionnaires were employed to collect data. To analyze the data, both descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential (one sample t-test) statistics were used.

The findings of the study indicate that the students had favorable perceptions of online learning. Despite the students' positive perceptions, the results of the study showed that the practice of online learning in the universities was limited; especially the practice of synchronous online learning was low.

The results suggest that the concerned bodies at the universities should consider implementing a blended (both synchronous and asynchronous) learning system to deliver an online learning approach.

This is one of the first studies in a higher education context in Ethiopia, which tries to investigate the postgraduate EFL students' perceptions and practices of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is original because it investigated the status of online learning during the pandemic in a developing country like Ethiopia; it provides a real and convincing idea of a new way of learning in the post-COVID-19 context. The study can also be useful for related future research in the context of a pandemic-like COVID-19.

While most language departments of the university offer service-learning (SL) subjects based on language teaching, such as “Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Local Schools” and “Serving the Community through Teaching English,” this paper aims to argue that teaching students to teach language(s) is yet to be the best strategy to serve the service recipients.

SL is widely understood as an experiential learning pedagogy that integrates academic focus, reflection and community service and is shown to be impactful. In Hong Kong, the first university that has made SL a graduation requirement is the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University). Considering this, new SL courses have proliferated over the past decade. Adopting a narrative inquiry approach, this paper examines personal narratives from a new SL subject aiming to raise awareness of refugees in Hong Kong. The data includes students’ reflective journals, co-created personal narratives and podcasts and semi-structured interviews.

This paper finds that crafting and recording narratives of shared experiences deepens cultural understanding, cultivates empathy and facilitates language learning in a genuine setting.

Ultimately, this paper advocates a well-designed SL that combines language, content and technology as a powerful, transformational experience for both college students and service recipients.

This paper focuses on a brand new SL course, “Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong,” offered in Semester 1, 2022–2023. The subject was developed by the two authors from a language division affiliated to the University. The deliverables were podcast recordings, co-authored and co-edited by the students and the children.

The paper aims to investigate and describe the complex and dynamic dilemmas teachers are facing connected to students' net-based out-of-school activities.

The authors draw on the notion of dilemmatic spaces when thematically analyzing focus group interviews conducted with 41 teachers at three lower secondary schools in Sweden.

Two themes capture the teachers' dilemmas concerning their students´ net-based out-of-school activities: negotiations of content and negotiations of professional identity. When teachers take part in professional discussions where dilemmatic spaces are recognized, rather than focusing on either being for or against digitalization, they are enabled to express a multifaceted view of professional identity.

This study is a starting point for further studies investigating how pedagogical and didactic decisions are made in a digital time.

The findings are expected to be helpful to policymakers in understanding teachers' work. Also, teachers can be empowered by taking the departure in the findings and discussing how to handle dilemmas fruitfully.

In a rapidly changing digital society, it is important to investigate what dilemmas teachers face in their work in order to learn from them. This study is a significant contribution.