Users’ interactions with crowdsourcing platforms: mutual feeding

Online crowdsourcing sites/platforms have become popular in recent years, and language learners use a variety of crowdsourcing games or websites as in- or/and outside-class activities. The first objective of this paper is to measure attitudes of language learners in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of North Macedonia, Poland and Türkiye towards errors in crowdsourcing sites/platforms and their willingness and motivation to improve applications by correcting errors, providing feedback, or adding content. The other two goals of the study are to uncover students' attitudes towards background data being collected by crowdsourcing sites and to which extent this impacts their interaction with the program or the app. The data for the study were collected using a cross-culturally appropriate online questionnaire in English explicitly designed for this study. In the pilot phase, the questionnaire's appropriateness was checked before it was distributed, and it was divided into two parts. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, with country and context-specific variables taken into account. The results reveal that there are both interesting similarities and differences in the ways informants in the examined countries perceive, evaluate and contribute to the available crowdsourcing resources when learning foreign languages. As a result, the findings may be valuable to language teachers who want to incorporate crowdsourcing sites and activities into their classes, as well as platform/game producers who want to create materials that are cross-culturally useful and valid.

Lina Miloshevska
University of Information Science and Technology “St. Paul the Apostle” - Ohrid
North Macedonia

Lina Miloshevska MSc, is Senior lecturer at the University of Information Science and Technology “St. Paul the Apostle” - Ohrid, North Macedonia. She teaches Technical Communication, Academic writing and ESP courses to undergraduate students. She holds an MSc. in Philology from the Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski” - University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius - Skopje, North Macedonian. Her main interests are contact linguistics, language change and ELT methodology. She has authored or co-authored many papers and participated in a number of international conferences and European research projects. Lina Miloshevska is also a sworn translator for English Arabic and Macedonian.

Nihada Delibegović Džanić
University of Tuzla
Bosnia and Herzegovina

Nihada Delibegović Džanić PhD, is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She teaches linguistics courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She holds a PhD. in Linguistics from the University of Osijek, Croatia. Her main interests are cognitive linguistics, phraseology and ELT methodology. She has authored or co-authored many papers and participated in a number of international conferences. Nihada Delibegović Džanić is also an international expert for accreditation and evaluation of study programs. She participated in many European research projects.

Elżbieta Gajek
University of Warsaw
Poland

Prof. Dr hab. Elżbieta Gajek is a university professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics University of Warsaw, Poland. She is Head of Department of Language Acquisition Studies As she graduated Warsaw University of Technology, Department of Electronics and then completed her at University of Warsaw, Department of Modern Languages her main research areas cover Computer Assisted Language Learning, and Methodology of Computer Enhanced Teaching Languages, Distance Learning and Mobile Assisted Language Learning. She has worked as an English teacher and teacher trainer for many years. She participated in many European research projects. She also coordinated academic telecollaborative projects with American and Chinese universities. As a Polish national expert she has been involved in the eTwinning programme since 2004. She is an author and co-author of over 100 books, book chapters, and journal articles on CALL and MALL, on teacher training for media, and ICT-based instruction published worldwide.

Çiler Hatipoğlu
Middle East Technical University
Turkey

Çiler HATIPOĞLU is a Full Professor at the Department of Foreign Language Education at METU, Ankara, where she teaches various Linguistics and FLE courses at undergraduate and graduate levels (https://avesis.metu.edu.tr/ciler/yayinlar). Her main research interests are cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and foreign language teacher training. Dr Hatipoglu has also either been a member of the research team or led national and international research projects on corpus linguistics (e.g., she is a member of the first Spoken Turkish Corpus development team), language assessment (EU project), language learning and material production (COST EU project), European Network on International Student Mobility: Connecting Research and Practice (EU Project), address forms in foreign language education and cross-cultural politeness. With a research team (MEB-UNICEF funded project), she investigated how and where formative assessment can best be integrated into the primary and middle school English as a foreign language education in Turkey.

Potrebno predznanje: crowdsourcing sites/tools/games, ELT methodology