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EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES
EE interests of secondary school students, it seemed straightforward to try to
gain insight into them through gualitative methods, more precisely, semi¬
structured interviews. The findings of the qualitative interview study showed
that students pursue a number of EE activities in their free time, namely (1)
traveling abroad and using English, (2) watching TV, movies, and series in
English, (3) watching videos in English, (4) listening to music in English, (5)
reading blogs in English, (6) reading books in English, (7) reading and check¬
ing the news in English, (8) using social media in English, (9) playing video
games in English, (10) exposure to native speakers of English or speakers with
different L1s than that of the participants, (11) communicating in English while
doing sports, and (12) using English at school in classes other than EFL. It is
striking that learners use English as a means in several cases, such as visiting
different websites or watching videos for non-language learning purposes. In
addition, when they consume EE content, such as series and movies, they
mainly do so for their own entertainment. This, of course, does not prevent
but promotes foreign language learning while using the language (Bialystok
1981) - through incidental learning (Schmidt 1993, 1995, 2001). Based on the
quantitative results of Study Two, the most favored EE activities include (1)
reading books, (2) reading posts on Instagram, (3) playing video games, (4)
chatting with others, (5) reading websites, (6) watching movies, (7) reading
blogs, (8) reading Twitter posts, (9) watching films and series in English, (10)
watching tutorial videos, (11) watching videobloggers on YouTube, (12) listen¬
ing to music, (13) reading posts on Facebook, (14) watching gamers on Twitch,
(15) reading magazines, (16) watching TikTok videos, (17) reading newspapers,
(18) reading news in English. Based on these findings, it may be concluded that
students seem to prefer EE activities that they can do on their smart devices
and typically require a shorter attention span (e.g., listening to music, or watch¬
ing videos).
Similar to the findings of previous research (cf. Grau 2009, Jézsa-Imre
2013), gender differences in students’ preferences were also identified. Video
games, for instance, seem to be more popular among boys, but the qualitative
results also included, of course, female participants who identified themselves
as “gamers”. In contrast, both qualitative and quantitative results show that
TikTok and beauty and makeup videos on YouTube are more popular among
girls.
The results also show that in many cases, where available, students use
English subtitles instead of Hungarian subtitles when consuming audiovisual
EE content. This contributes to incidental learning and increases L2 awareness,
as learners, in addition to hearing L2 input, can also visualize the language
content.
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