The construct of linguistic risk-taking offers innovative informal language-learning opportunities for English/French (Linguistic Risk-Taking Passport developed in Canada) and German ('Riskier was!' Booklet developed in Austria) designed to foster authentic and autonomous language use outside the classroom. We present interview data findings pointing to considerable benefits of a digital risk-taking app.
In this presentation we address informal language learning through a pedagogical practice called Linguistic Risk-Taking (Slavkov & Séror, 2019), conceived at a Canadian bilingual post-secondary institution and subsequently developed at an Austrian university to supplement classroom learning with leisure-based, real-life practice. Linguistic risks are opportunities for learners to execute authentic communicative acts in the target language outside the classroom. The construct of linguistic risk-taking encapsulates both language anxiety (Horwitz, 2010; MacIntyre, 2017) and enjoyment (Dewaele et al., 2018); recognizing and harnessing these two aspects to benefit learners. To encourage informal learning through linguistic risk-taking, we developed a Passport (in Canada) and a booklet 'Riskier was!' (in Austria) with extensive task-lists of daily-life, professional, academic, and leisure activities in the learners' target languages (e.g. sing karaoke, order food, explore museums, make social media posts, etc.). We implemented semi-structured/expert interviews (Meuser & Nagel, 2009; Misoch, 2015) with subsets of participating learners of French and German. The interview data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014), focusing on suggestions for improvement regarding the Linguistic Risk-Taking Initiative. Our findings point to considerable benefits in developing a digital risk-taking app. These findings support our creation of a Linguistic Risk-Taking app, which incorporates the affordances of mobile technology.
