| Summary: | The present study aimed to reveal how learners of Chinese as a
foreign language use mobile technology to study Chinese outside the
classroom. Researchers used sociocultural perspectives to frame the
study and grounded theory to analyze data. Eleven English-speaking
students who had learned Chinese for different years at a midwestern
university participated in the study. They answered 23 major
questions by submitting journal entries and participating in an
interview.
Compared with computer assisted language learning, mobile
devices bring changes to tutorial functions, social computing, and
gaming. Participants heavily explored tutorial functions, used mobile
devices differently from computers for social computing, and showed
interest in gaming. Although participants were enthusiastic about
using mobile devices to learn Chinese, the number of applications
they used and the variety of activities they engaged in were limited.
Findings suggest that the effective incorporation of mobile devices to
learn Chinese depends on collaboration and scaffolding
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