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EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES
instance, said the following: “I’m not active, but I have Instagram.” In contrast,
Vera reported that she spends two hours a day using Instagram. In her words:
I love Instagram and use it often. Probably two hours a day, at least. I follow lots of
foreigners, Germans, Russians, maybe French, British, and Americans [...]. I think
most of the people that I follow are foreigners.
It became evident from the interviews that all participants have a smart¬
phone, and most of their smartphone applications are in English, but the menu
of their smartphone is typically Hungarian. Another popular application,
TikTok, was also mentioned by some of the participants. TikTok is a video-shar¬
ing social networking service used to make short videos in different genres,
such as dance, comedy, and education. The duration of videos on TikTok
ranges from fifteen seconds to one minute. This video-sharing platform is
popular among the participants; however, most of them are not registered
users. Instead, they simply tend to check the content of this application. Val¬
entina stated the following about TikTok:
I’m not a [registered] user, so I’m not a[n active] user, I just watch some silly stuff, I
cannot relate to lip-sync to some music and make funny gestures, but I like watching
others do it.
As it is apparent from the above quote, she does not make videos but con¬
sumes content on a regular basis as she finds this kind of content fun. As
Sundgvist and Olin-Scheller (2013) claim, EE activities and social media ap¬
plications on smartphones in particular may be considered a major resource
for L2 learning as teenagers are prosumers (both producers and consumers)
of normally English language content (Lam 2000, Thorne et al. 2009, Yi 2008).
This means that learners often compose texts, create videos (e.g., on TikTok,
YouTube, and Instagram), or simply consume L2 content and communicate
with others online.
4.5.8 Video games
The next topic was playing video games in English. There were gender-related
differences in playing video games. Most boys reported that they play video
games regularly and identified as gamers, while only one girl did the same.
Paul pointed out that as most video games are in English, when it comes to
online gaming, the language used for intercultural communication is almost
exclusively the English language, and this kind of online communication and
gaming, in general, provides a plethora of linguistic input and, therefore, could
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