The Handbook of Informal Language Learning

14Mobility, Media, and Multiplicity: Immigrants' Informal Language Learning via Media

KRISTEN H. PERRY AND ANNIE M. MOSES

Introduction

In the mid‐1990s, Kristen's family hosted Eva, a high school exchange student from Germany. Almost every afternoon after school, Eva disappeared into the family's basement recreation room and popped a movie into the VCR (video cassette recorder). She watched the same movies repeatedly, insisting that those videos – more than anything else – helped her to learn English. By the mid‐2000s, Kristen tutored and conducted research within a Sudanese refugee community that had resettled in Michigan. Parents with young children purposefully watched educational programming on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) or cartoons as a method of developing their own English proficiency. At the same time, using desktop computers with internet connectivity, orphaned youth networked with others in the Sudanese diaspora and kept abreast of news regarding the ongoing conflicts in Sudan via both English‐ and Arabic‐language news websites and chatrooms. Fast‐forward to the late 2010s, when a master's student in Kristen's course provided English tutoring for a middle‐schooler from China. As they chatted about fun things to do in the region, the pair passed a smartphone back and forth, using the device to look up words in Google Translate and to find images to illustrate unknown words or places.

Each of these examples highlights the important ways in which language ...