O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
At the RoviraiVirgili University studies on mobile technology have been carried out for a 
few years now and date backto 2008. These six years of constant research, new studies 
as well as the ever-changing technology havenow allowed us to take a step back and 
look at our research from a perspective, see what was learnt and draw conclusions that 
could be useful for the future investigation. Previous projects carried out at URV include: 
“SMS as a learning tool. An experimental study” (2009
-2011). This was our first project 
related to mlearning.

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This experiment´s results encouraged us to continue since we found that students feltthe 
experience was engaging and worthwhile, they felt comfortable working with their 
mobile devices, and it did not bring any real change in their daily lives except for the fact 
that they received more SMS per week on their phones. According to the data obtained, 
the subjects preferred receiving small bits of information (all contained in one SMS) 
which could be answered immediately. We also found that the subjects preferred 
answering the exercises that did not need any support material. The possibility of 
answering at any time and in any place was regarded as an extremely positive feature. 
These results were published in Volume 21, Number 1, of The EUROCALL Review. 
The next one was entitled “Improving learners’ reading skills through instant short 
messages: a sample study using WhatsApp” (2012
-2013): what stood out as a 
conclusion of this study was the need to create a teacher-independent application to 
automatically send all the text messages and exercise
s to avoid relying on a teacher’s 
constant availability to send the messages, according to a set schedule, via a handheld 
mobile device. Also, the main conclusions were the following: the vast majority of the 
students reported a high level of satisfaction and agreed that not only had their 
willingness to read in English increased, but the experience had also had a positive 
impact on their reading habits, and had resulted in more regularity and confidence. 
These results were presented in the WorldCALL2013, and published in the Conference 
Proceedings. Also, the team was granted the 2013 University Council Award: 
PremidelConsell Social de QualitatDocent 2013 for this project. 
The most recent study related to the use of mobile devices in education at our University 
is entitled “WhatsApp as a tool for the enhancement of spoken fluency at university level” 
(2014). This project is carried out as a doctoral thesis (by Olga Hryckiewicz and 
supervised by Gutierrez-Colon). The data has been gathered and the analysis is still in 
process. Part of the data was analyzed and the self-perceived fluency results show that 
students using mobile phones for the activities in the subject they were enrolled in, at 
the end of the course, felt more comfortable while speaking and thought they improved 
significantly. This, together with similarly higher scores in motivation levels, might result 
in those students being more eager to engage in spoken discourse in L2, practice more, 
boost their confidence and thus make quicker progress in their overall spoken fluency 
results. 
Finally, there is the project our University group has started working on recently. We 
wish to transfer the knowledge we have gained in our previous studies and move on to a 
more practical field and create a tool that could be used in other educational insitutions. 
This is because despite the slow but steady increase in the number of projects based on 
mobile technologies practices, there are few that have researched the discipline of 
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Research studies on the use of mobile 
technologies in this field are practically non-existent. In order to fill this gap, this new 
project aims at the integration of Smart-Phones to support the development of reading 
and listening comprehension skills of secondary school students studying the CLIL 
subjects of Technology and Science. The working name of the study is 
–
SmartCLIL and 
it involves the creation of a mobile app for learning that would be adequate for its use in 
Primary and Secondary schools.
The reason for the short description of the studies on mLearning carried out at our 
university is for us to be able to shed light on some of the challenges we have 
encountered along the way and that, we believe, are universal for some, if not the 
majority, of investigations in this field. One of the issues present throughout all the 
projects we have carried out was that of technological disparity or, in other words, 
technological differences that are present in mobile technology. In general, students own 
a great variety of mobile devices with different operating Systems (OS) when it comes to 
phones and other handheld mobile devices (such as tablets and PDAs); these include 
Android, iPhone, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian, Firefox OS, to name a few.

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This leads to a situation in which not all the programs and files necessary to carry out the 
experiments are supported by all the phones our subjects own, the necessity to 
download compatibility layers, still, these initial incompatibilities lead to problems with 
memory management when layers are downloaded, etc. Still, these shortcomings can be 
solved but it requires a lot of additional time on the part of the students as well as the 
investigators and, quite importantly, can lead to confusion on the part of the learners and 
significantly decrease their motivation as to their participation in the project. These are 
the circumstances all investigators try to avoid 
–
demotivation, especially when we are 
studying a new and a quite challenging field that faces a lot of different hurdles along the 
way.
System compatibility is only one of the differences in mobile devices we have observed. 
Screen sizes are another confrontation we faced. The majority of our studies required the 
sending visual files (such as pictures, cartoons, photos and videos) to our students. 
Some of them were unable to carry out a given task solely due to the fact that they could 
not see the image clearly enough in order to perform the task they were asked to do. 
These students reported the necessity of resorting to regular computers and/or laptops in 
order to be able to do so and this was something that, for obvious reasons, we wanted to 
avoid.
Still, the challenges present in mLearning research are often independent of the devices 
themselves. It has been observed that the very attitudes towards mobile phones in 
academic settings: both institutional and from the learners´ point of view affect this field 
of study. Mobile-learning has not yet gained the label of a ´serious´ research field, even 
amongst university students.Such learners often produce responses to (especially 
spoken) mlearning activities in a quite informal fashion; they do not treat their tasks as 
seriously as they would if they were to hand in a written paper, for instance. This fact, 
we believe, could be attributed to the medium, the circumstances are such that handheld 
devices are present in everyday lifes of the students, they accompany them from 
morning to night and they go with them everywhere from schools to bars. This 
omnipresence (that on the other hand surely is a great asset of mobile learning) causes 
the diminishing of the ´seriousness´ of the medium and might influence students´ 
performance. 
Also, the institutional view on mLearning manifests itself in, for instance, the need of the 
researcher to seek official permissions in order to be able to use mobile phones in class, 
something incomprehensible and unthinkable in the case of the use of any other 
technological devices and programs such as computers, smart boards or PowerPoint. 
However, there often are no clear regulations on the possible use of handheld devices in 
class or they are just being (often reluctantly) introduced which only adds to the 
confusion and the possible negative judgments about the field.
The last challenge that we are going to mention is that of the amount of data: there is 
animmense input of data gathered when using mobile phones as a tool in language 
classroom but we still do not have the tools to organize, analyze, and present this data. 
We, to date, need to adapt it to the computer interface; this is extremely time-
consuming for the teacher/researcher and often considerably slows down the process of 
data processing and the results’ release dates. Furthermore, to give a vivid example, 
spoken data gathered need to be transferred onto a desktop computer; however, this is 
just the beginning. Such data, to our knowledge, needs to and 
is
analyzed manually. This 
I to say that, for instance, all the temporal fluency measures need to be examined that 
way since there is no program that could aid the researcher in this process. Here, we are 
not only touching the topic of time investment but also, or even primarily, results´ 
reliability and human error that mightaffect the study´s outcomes.
Mobile learning, even though it has been repeated for quite a few years now, still 
remains a new field of study and, as such, is bound to face obstacles and challenges that, 

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to our mind, are, in the end, positive as they help seek solutions and improve the overall 
investigation in the field; they also aid us in intending to find new paths and also be 
aware of the limitations and the possible shortcomings of the studies. All in all, we do 
believe that all the challenges enlisted in this paper can and will be overcome with time 
which will greatly improve the process of our research and, in turn, will pave the way for 
mLearning to fully establish itself in foreign language classrooms as an equal partner to 
such tools as desktop computers and smart boards.