L2 Digital Literacy: Korean EFL Students use their Cell Phone Videocams to Make an L2 English Video Guide to their College Campus

Abstract

In Korea and Japan, the high penetration of student cell phones with built-in features including SMS, email, Internet capability and bilingual dictionaries, already offers ubiquitous computing facilities for pedagogical applications. Further, nearly all Korean students belong to the Hangul social networking site Cyworld.com. This paper describes an L2 English lesson, where Korean college students were asked at very short notice to make English language video guides to their campus, shooting their videos on the videocams built-in to their cell phones. Students then emailed their videos to their instructor, who arranged for file conversion where necessary, then uploaded their videos to the vblog on his English language US.Cyworld.com homepage. Students were then asked by email to view the videos and post responses in the homepage guestbook, which required them to set up their own English language account, and invited to further explore the social networking site, which is popular among Korean-Americans.