A Study Of English Major Students' Self-Directed Informal Digital Learning Beyond The Classroom

With the development and wide application of digital technology,self-directed informal digital learning has become an indispensable means and method for contemporary college students.Many scholars at home and abroad have conducted a considerable number of researches on self-directed informal digital learning,but few attempts have been made to focus on English major students.Therefore,this study aimed to investigate English major students' informal digital learning of English beyond the classroom.By adopting the questionnaire of Lai(2018)and Jurkovi?(2019),this study was conducted among English majors from three universities in Yunnan province.To adapt to the actual situation of domestic English majors,some of the items have been deleted.A total of 420 paper questionnaires were administered,and 412 valid questionnaires were recovered.Then,quantitative analysis data were collected.Finally,descriptive statistics,frequency analysis and T-test analysis were performed by statistical software SPSS23.0.The results are as follows.First,the participation of English majors in out-of-class informal digital learning activities was diversified,including reading emails,writing emails,listening English songs,watching English movies and so on.According to the quantitative data analysis,the mean values of most digital activities that participants carried out in were above 3.5.Second,in students' out-of-class self-directed informal digital learning,their learning mainly focused on such receptive activities as reading emails and listening to the radio on software,indicating that they were more likely to passively accept learning rather than actively participate.Third,factor analysis generated three dimensions of students' digital learning experience of different types,namely personalization,authenticity and connectivity.Fourth,in the informal digital learning outside the classroom,students often used smart phones and laptops to construct their self-directed informal digital English learning.For example,they used mobile phones for consulting English words or adopted translation tools tofacilitate their comprehension of vocabulary and grammar.Meanwhile,the participants tended to watch TV shows or movies through laptops.However,it was found that tablets,such as the iPad,were not frequently used for language learning.This study hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the status of informal digital English learning and enrich the research perspective of informal digital English learning.The thesis closes with a brief description of the limitations of this study and suggestions for future research.