Oldal 84 [84]
OCR
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 smartphone, 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-sharing 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. Valentina 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 consumes 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 applications 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 + 82 +
