Communicate to learn, learn to communicate: a study of engineering students’ communication strategies in a mobile-assisted learning environment

This paper reports a 3-month study investigating engineering students’ Communication Strategies (CSs) in a mobile-assisted course. 67 Chinese learners of English in this course volunteered to participate in the study. The instruments included oral communication sessions, stimulated recall interviews, WeChat exchanges, etc. Results showed that the participants used a variety of CSs when completing the academic tasks. Moreover, these CSs were closely related to the students’ involvement in meaning negotiation while they were interacting to complete learning tasks. It is suggested that instructors have CS training tailored to their students’ learning tasks. Future research should focus on a longitudinal investigation of the transfer of CSs across tasks.