engleski

Crowdsourcing and (Second and Foreign) Language Learning

Crowdsourcing as a concept has been around for centuries, the term itself is ill-defined and unfamiliar to the general public. The term was first coined in 2006 in Wired magazine by Jeff Howe (2006). However, crowdsourcing itself has been around since the 18th century when the first Longitude Prize was established in 1714 by the British government to find a simple and practical method to determine the longitude of a ship (Sobel and Andrewes 2003:63). Many classifications and definitions of crowdsourcing were proposed, as in Brabham (2008), Vuković (2009), Geiger (2011), Afuah and Tucci (2012), Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-De-Guevara (2012), Prpić, Taeihagh and Melton (2015) - to name just a few. For the purpose of this manuscript, crowdsourcing is a practice of collecting goods and services (e.g. information, ideas, financial resources, etc.), usually using the Internet, from an undefined network of people by publishing an open call. More recently, there has been a growing need to make more language materials available, leading to the launch of the European COST Action 16105: European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques (enetCollect) aimed at developing a network of more than a hundred stakeholders from Europe and beyond (Lyding et al. 2018). The main tasks of this European initiative is to combine the well-established domain of language learning and teaching with the recent and successful crowdsourcing approaches. In an educational environment, crowdsourcing has significant implications on the development of practical experiences in learners, as well as on the exchange of acquired knowledge among teachers by means of creating educational content (textbooks, language materials) (Jiang, Schlagwein and Benatallah 2018). Crowdsourcing can be used to generate/annotate language learning materials, and thus does not need to be confound to only collecting/logging data from language learners (Volodina 2019). In the field of second and foreign language learning, crowdsourcing is overlapping with computer assisted language learning (CALL), which enables the use of technology in the creation, collection and evaluation of language materials and content by (non) native speakers, teachers, translators, and other interested professionals and institutions (e.g. Keuleers et. al. 2015). The aim of this manuscript is for the Croatian team of experts participating in the COST Action to present the objectives and current results of this international network. We report on existing language learning materials and workflows for producing it, state-of-the art of explicit and implicit crowdsourcing approaches as well as on theoretical framework for producing material through explicit and implicit crowdsourcing. Additionally, we present research on existing state-of-the-art online language learning solutions, give insight in research on technical solutions for the scalability of a crowdsourcing solution, as well as introduce goals of enetCollect regarding ethical, legal, and profitable language learning solution.

Crowdsourcing ; Language Learning ; Language Materials ; enetCollect

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