O n f e r e n c e

Mar Gutiérrez-Colón Plana, Olga Hryckiewicz 
Universitat Rovirai Virgili, Tarragona, Spain 
[e-mail], [e-mail] 
Research on Mobile Phone Learning/Teaching: Three Challenges 
Bio data 
Dr. 
Gutierrez-Colon
-- Director of the Masters Programme in Foreign Language 
Teacher. Associate professor. University Rovirai Virgili, Tarragona. Spain 
Mrs. 
Olga Hryckiewicz
--Assistant professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. PhD 
Student. 
Abstract 
At this stage we believe we don’t need to explain the academic values of mLearning: Its 
technical characteristics has created a potential for significant changes in the language 
learning and teaching practices. And this fact also implies that many new challenges have 
appeared both for teachers and researchers (or both). Four years ago, our first 
experiment was carried out using sms: most of our Spanish students did not have 
smartphones and free programs such as WhatsApp did not exist. And now it seems that 
this happened in a previous technological era, but it was only in 2009.
All these changes have also brought up new challenges in the research approach of 
mLearning. In this paper, we are going to focus on three different types of challenges: 1) 
heterogeneous technology: technological differences have become an issue that needs to 
be addressed in terms of research; 2) attitudes towards mobile phones in academic 
settings: both institutional and from the learners´ point of view. Mobile-learning has not 
yet gained the label of ´´serious´´ research field, even amongst university students, 
which often produce the (especially spoken) mlearning activities in a quite informal 
fashion, fact that we believe could be attributed to the medium. Also, the institutional 
view of mlearning manifests itself in the need of the researcher to seek official 
permissions in order to be able to use mobile phones in class, something 
incomprehensible in the case of the use of any other technological device such as a 
computer or PowerPoint; and finally 3) amount of data: there is a big input of students’ 
data gathered when using mobile phones as a tool in the language classroom. But we still 
do not have tools to organize, analyze, and present this data. We still need to adapt it to 
the computer interface and this fact is extremely time-consuming for the 
teacher/researcher.