Learning English through mobile phones
Although this article is now a year old, I find it extremely fascinating that mobile phone users in rural India are learning English language through mobile phones.
Hari Bhandari Bahadur (55), a guard in the St Xavier’s College, never got a chance to go to school. But after procuring a mobile phone in 2005, he has learnt to identify all English alphabets within a short time.
Now he identifies the ‘missed call’ given by his wife, as the mobile screen reflects ‘BB’. “I saved her number as capital letters ‘B’ written twice meaning ‘biwi’ (wife) so I understand that my wife is calling,” said Bahadur innocently.
Another such person is vegetable vendor Mohammad Shamim, who in between selling vegetables, has picked up words like “menu, call, reject, receive, silent, vibrate” in the past seven years of cellphone usage.
It would be interesting to know, if this trend is prevalent through out India or just limited to northern India. Also if it is happening across the world. Secondly, whether people who are learning English through mobile phone usage are using it in their daily life or limiting it to their interactions on mobile phone.
9 comments
“..he has learnt to identify all English alphabets within a short time.”
.. which is more than the person who wrote that article did. Shouldn’t it be ‘letters of the English alphabet’?
Thank you for your comment Shefaly. There’s nothing I can do about it.
Hi Priyanka,
Pls check http://www.englishseekho.in
NV
Thanks. Will check it out.
hi Priyanka , i’m G. Azarmi MA student of TEFL in Urmia University. While my research studies are focusing on Molbie learnin, specially Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL), i’ll be glad to know more about your information and findings about the usages of Mobile amongst youth poeple. hope to have good share of knowlegde. thanks
Hi Priyanka,
In Pakistan, I run a service named English Message Service (EMS). I send one message of English Vocabulary everyday and There are 50 thousand subscribers of EMS.
Now I am starting an Open University. It all started with just 50 members a couple of years ago.
If you want to know more please feel free to contact me.
Best regards,
This is a recent article on mobile English learning in Bangladesh:
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/29/english-in-action-mobile-learning-in-bangladesh/
And, here are some other current links to mobile English learning:
http://esl.about.com/b/2011/03/09/practicing-conversations-in-english-on-your-mobile-phone.htm
And:
http://www.englishfeed.com/?p=134
http://www.englishfeed.com/?p=144
Where, from a Twitter feed, I saw that about 25% of the traffic to these mobile web applications are from India. I can’t find that Link, but, I’m pretty sure that’s correct.
Hi Priyanka,
This is a trend throughout India. I work with some of the major English teaching organisations that develop English learning courses for mobile phones. I must say that it is a very interesting and growing market. You can visit http://www.enrichyourenglish.com for more details.
Regards,
Ruth
Thank you for your comment.
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