mobile english language learning (mell) a literature review

Mobile English Language Learning (MELL): a literature review

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International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research

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The Development of Mobile Applications for Language Learning: A Systematic Review of Theoretical Frameworks

This systematic review was conducted to examine theories that were adopted or considered in the development of mobile applications for language learning. It aims to provide a holistic overview of major theoretical principles that underpin each developmental study to identify trends and gaps in the synthesised literature. The studies were collected from the Scopus and Web of Science databases as they were the main sources of reputable journals. Primary searches between 2011 and 2020 revealed approximately 158 studies related to the topic under investigation. After further filtering based on the inclusion criteria and removal of duplicates, 39 studies matched the research criteria and were used for further analysis. The analysis revealed that researchers tend to choose to solve problems pertaining to vocabulary learning and learners’ motivation through the development of mobile applications for language learning. They preferred to use constructivist-based theories such as situated learning and collaborative learning in guiding their development though behaviourist principles are also dominant. However, very few studies used theories related to language acquisition and learning in the design and development process. Hence, this gap should be given priority in future developmental research within the same scope as the generic learning theories may not be accurately addressing the language learning problems.

https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.21.8.15

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12 Regionalism: England

Alex Broadhead is Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool, and his interests lie in the area of dialect in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Linguistic creativity is a recurring focus of his work, which employs the tools of stylistics and sociolinguistics to illustrate how, for many of the writers of this period, dialect was a source of joyful experimentation. He has published on William Wordsworth, Josiah Relph, John Clare, and (with Jane Hodson) Romantic-era fiction. In 2014, his first monograph, The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity , was released. His second, The Language of Early English Dialect Literature , will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

• Published: 22 May 2024
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This chapter examines the ways in which four Lakes-based writers—Thomas West, William Wordsworth, Ann Wheeler, and Dorothy Wordsworth—navigated between two contrasting modes of Romantic regionalism. The first mode, driven by a desire to provide an exhaustive inventory of the life or history of place, usually reinforced the idea of cities and regions as discrete zones, each with their own identity and character, even as they drove the forces which unsettled and dispersed local communities (tourism, for instance, or enclosure). The second mode registered the discontents of that disruption, and testified to the fact that, for many (especially women and labouring-class people), the lived experience of regionality was characterized as much by dislocation, incoherence, and the uncanny, as it was by a sense of rootedness. In the differences between the two forms, the author finds a deeper, unresolved division at the heart of Romanticism’s connection to the English provinces.

There is a version of the Romantic narrative in which its writers are driven from the capital by centrifugal force and come to find a new sense of belonging and community in the English provinces. One form of this narrative occasionally creeps into the writing associated with the ‘regional turn’ taken by Romantic studies in the past two decades: ‘in this endeavour’, Nicholas Roe writes, ‘geographical distance from the metropolis becomes one measure of cultural vitality’. 1 Separately, Jonathan Bate has argued that William Wordsworth was ‘a poet of Lakeland more than a poet of England’, one bound to the village of Grasmere by a ‘sacramental attitude to place’. 2 Comparably idealized understandings of locality and community can, in fact, be found large in Romantic ecocriticism, as Simon Kövesi has pointed out with reference to the critical reception of John Clare. 3

Certainly, there are persuasive arguments for reading the environmental impulse in Romantic writing in regional terms. In this volume, for instance, David Higgins, in chapter 11 , observes that local ways of thinking and writing about plants and animals offered Romantic writers a more respectful, less anthropocentric and less objectifying language for describing nature than the ‘more encyclopaedic and technical natural histories that were widely available in the period’. 4 Even so, I want in this chapter to make a case for an alternative reading of Romantic regionalism: one that attends to its more conflicted and ambivalent side—a side that is most visible in its nonfiction prose. This Romantic regionalism is divided in spirit, pulled between two opposing impulses: the first, the drive to survey an area or its culture exhaustively; the second, a personal response to place, characterized by a heightened sensitivity to the discontents of ‘belonging’ to (or being driven from) a regional community.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the era of the great English regional novel was still a generation away. The Brontës’ treatment of Yorkshire, George Eliot’s relationship with the Midlands, Elizabeth Gaskell’s representation of northern England, and Thomas Hardy’s rendering of Wessex would, in the Victorian period, transcend the simple function of setting. These places, which each novelist revisited, respectively, across a lifetime of work, became instead an integral part of the authorial identity of these writers, as fundamental to their oeuvres as their respective politics, religion, or literary influences.

This was not the case in the Romantic period. While the English provinces occasionally came under close scrutiny in fiction—for instance, Bath and Lyme Regis in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818)—the Romantic-era novel, driven in part by the ongoing popularity of Gothicism, was more typically set in continental Europe, particularly Italy and France. For Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others, the fascination of perceivedly exotic, typically Roman Catholic, overseas settings exerted a stronger pull than the English regions. It may be true that, as Fiona Stafford argues, ‘the local was foundational to any sense of Englishness or Britishness’ in the period, 5 but when provincial English village life was central to the plot and effects of a novel, as in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), its precise location tended not to be dwelt upon at any length. And although it is possible for an author to write about an area without representing the dialect of its inhabitants, it is nevertheless telling that representation of English regional dialects in novels lagged far behind the use of Scots, Welsh English, and Irish English in the novels of this period. 6 Indeed, Anthony Jarrells observes (in this volume) that ‘regionalism in Scotland became almost synonymous with the category of region itself in this period’. 7 Whether this was a cause or an effect of the tremendous popularity of Walter Scott and, to a lesser degree, John Galt and James Hogg, is difficult to say. Equally difficult to answer is the question of whether the English regional novel was stymied by the popularity of its Scottish counterpart or simply had yet to catch up.

In fact, the most striking English regional prose of the Romantic period can be found not in its novels, but on its textual, geographical, and canonical margins: in prefaces, footnotes, and appendices; in those works produced by local printing presses; in unpublished journals and letters; in tour guides; and in the ephemera of magazines and newspapers. It is in these contexts that we see a growth of English regional consciousness, which would ultimately reach its apex in the Victorian period, with the very different golden ages of the English provincial novel and the English dialect writing tradition respectively.

In his study of national and regional identity, David Higgins has made a case for a version of ‘Romantic localism’ that is ‘potentially outward looking’. 8 His observation that ‘narratives of localised selfhood in English Romantic writing’ take place in the context of ‘broader national and transnational formations’ (2) runs parallel to recent work in the field of dialectology. Research into the formation of dialects by scholars working in this field has brought into sharper focus the ways in which ideas about place, community, and localness are shaped by historical processes of mobility and globalization. As Michael Silverstein puts it: ‘the very concept of locality as opposed to globality presupposes a contrastive consciousness of self-other placement that is part of a cultural project of groupness’. 9 In other words, it is only once people have become aware of the wider world that they start to develop a sense of where ‘home’ is and who does, and does not, belong there. Their growing sense that they are a part of this community but not that community is not a natural occurrence, but rather a ‘cultural project’: that is to say, the result of political, economic, and ideological developments.

In the late eighteenth century, several such developments occurred both within and without England, which together contributed to the rise in regional consciousness. An increase in literacy rates, aligned with improved postal services and a growth in the number of local newspapers, served to make people in the English provinces more aware of the ‘globality’ described by Silverstein, even as they defined more clearly readers’ sense of the boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘there’. The war with France from 1793 onwards resulted in the mobilization of significant swathes of the male population in the form of the army and navy being deployed on the continent; men (including John Clare) joining militias in neighbouring areas; discharged soldiers and sailors being legally compelled to return to their birthplace (as described by Celeste Langan 10 ); and regiments being posted to different parts of the country—such as brings George Wickham into the geographical orbit of Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters in Pride and Prejudice (1813). Other factors, such as enclosures, which forced labourers to seek a living outside their native areas; improved transport by road, canal and, latterly, the railways; and, finally, the boom in domestic tourism, all served to sharpen Romantic-era people’s sense of England as a grid of separate localities, with its own topographical and linguistic peculiarities, precisely as they threatened to dissolve the boundaries between them by dispersing communities and exposing places to outside influences.

The prose regional writing of the Romantic era registered this ambivalence to differing degrees and in different ways. In a great many of its texts we find authors ranging between two antithetical poles. At one extreme is what I have termed the ‘survey’, which sought to provide an exhaustive inventory of the life or history of a city or region. In its purest form, the survey took various shapes: tour guides, enumerating a place’s sites of interest for prospective travellers; volumes of antiquities, typically focused on the historical buildings, writings, or titled families of an area; and the agricultural improvement treatise, which provided a full audit of the land management and farming of a particular county, along with suggestions for bringing it in line with new practices. Surveys such as these usually reinforced the idea of cities and regions as discrete zones, each with their own identity and character, even as they drove the forces which unsettled and dispersed local communities (tourism, for instance, or enclosure). At the other extreme, we find a mode of writing about place that typically achieved its most unfettered expression in diaries, journals, and letters. These texts testify to the fact that, for many (especially women and labouring-class people), the lived experience of regionality was characterized as much by dislocation, incoherence, and the uncanny, as it was by a sense of rootedness. These personal responses to place, typically unpublished at the time, give the lie to the more idealized statements of local attachment that have occasionally been made with reference to the Romantic period. Over the course of this chapter, I examine the ways in which four writers—Thomas West, William Wordsworth, Ann Wheeler, and Dorothy Wordsworth—navigated between these two contrasting forms of Romantic regionalism, finding in their differences a deeper, unresolved division at the heart of Romanticism’s connection to the English provinces.

It should be noted that the scope of this chapter is limited to the Lake District and its surrounding environs in the north-west of England. Needless to say, there existed at this time important literary regional hubs and networks elsewhere in the country (not least the south-west, as Nicholas Roe and others persuasively argue in a 2010 essay collection) 11 —so many, in fact, that it would be impossible to account for them all here. My aim, in this chapter, is to divine the spirit of English Romantic regionalism in general, and thus I have narrowed my focus to an area that Keith Hanley suggests ‘became representational of regionalist ideology’ from the early nineteenth century onwards. 12 It was through the idea of the Lake District, suggests Hanley, that the wider nation came to rethink the role of local areas in the life of Britain more generally. I make no such claims for the Lakes in this chapter: as we will see, the ideological emphases of each of the four writers differ broadly. Nevertheless, wider British interest in the Lake District meant that it was the site of intensive regionally focused writing during the Romantic period, and it is this that makes it an especially suitable site to lower a quadrat and take a sample of what was occurring in the period at large.

I want to begin by focusing on a text which, according to John Vaughan, ‘established the conventions for reacting to the English Lakes and provided a vocabulary in which to describe them’. 13 Thomas West, the author of A Guide to the Lakes (first published in 1778), had already surveyed the historical remnants of a local area in The Antiquities of Furness or An Account of the Royal Abbey of St Mary (1774). In the dedication to that work, West, a Jesuit priest, frames his detailed inventory of the ruins and annals of Furness in terms of the ‘connected view’ it gives the ‘Gentlemen, and Customary Tenants, of Furness’ of their ‘ancient customs, rights, privileges, and bye laws, upon which [their] tenures depend’. 14 Put another way, attending to the minutiae of local history helps to fortify the social and economic relationship of local tenants with their land. In A Guide to the Lakes , however, West justifies his attention to detail with reference to the future of a locality, rather than its past. Introducing the Guide , West writes

Since persons of genius, taste, and observation, began to make the tour of their own country, and give such pleasing accounts of the natural history, and improving state of the northern parts of the BRITISH Empire, the curious of all ranks have caught the spirit of visiting the same. The taste for landscape, as well as for the other objects of the noble art cherished under the protection of the greatest of kings and best of men, in which the genius of BRITAIN rivals ancient GREECE and ROME, induce many to visit the lakes of CUMBERLAND, WESTMORLAND, and LANCASHIRE, there to contemplate, in Alpine scenery, finished in nature’s highest tints, what refined art labours to imitate; the pastoral and rural landscape, varied in all stiles, the soft, the rude, the romantic, and sublime. Combinations not found elsewhere assembled within so small a tract of country. Another inducement to making the tour of the lakes, is the goodness of the roads; much improved since Mr. GRAY made his tour in 1765, and Mr. PENNANT his in 1772. The gentlemen of these counties have set a precedent worthy of imitation in the politest parts of the kingdom, by opening, at private expence, carriage roads, for the ease and safety of such as visit the country[.] 15

The Lakes here are both an object of improvement and the means by which ‘all ranks’ might improve themselves. West’s emphasis is unabashedly aspirational. The desire of visitors to the Lakes to imitate the growing taste for domestic landscapes; the desire of art to imitate nature; the (projected) desire of the wider kingdom to imitate the roadbuilding projects of local gentlemen—in each case, West’s readers here are invited to the Lakes not so much to ‘find themselves’, in the parlance of modern travelling, but rather to remake themselves, just as the north is being remade, and just as the carriage roads that will spirit them there have been remade. By locating the Lakes within ‘the northern parts of the BRITISH Empire’, West makes clear that the improvement offered by and exacted upon the Lakes is not the international, European kind that young gentlemen were once encouraged to find on the grand tour. Rather it is a form of improvement bound up with the reinvention of the world in the image of imperial Britain.

It is within the frame of imperial improvement that we might understand West’s exhaustive listing of details. Even by the standards of the tour guide genre, which, according to John Vaughan, presupposed ‘short descriptive inventories of the places, institutions and monuments likely to be of interest to their users’, West’s eye for minutiae is remarkable. Consider, for example, the entry for Kendal:

The approach to it from the north is pleasant, a noble river, the KENT, is discoverd [sic] flowing briskly through fertile fields, and visiting the town in its whole length; it is crossed by a bridge more venerable than handsome, where three great roads coincide, from SEDBERGH, KIRKBY STEPHEN, and PENRITH. The main street leading from the bridge slopes upwards to the center [sic] of the town, and contracts itself to an inconvenient passage, where it joins another principal street, which falls with a gentle declivity both ways, is a mile in length and of a spacious breadth. Was an area for a market-place opened at the incident of these two streets, it would give the town a noble appearance. The entrance from the south is by another bridge, which makes a short aukward [sic] turn into the suburbs, but after that the street opens well, and the town has a chearful [sic] appearance. In this town is a workhouse for the poor which for neatness and œconomy exceeds most of the kind in the kingdom. The inns are genteel and commodious, plentifully served, and the usage civil. The objects most worthy of notice are the manufactures: The chief of these are of the Kendal-cottons, a coarse woolen cloth; of the linseys; of knit worsted stockings; and a considerable tannery. The lesser manufactures are, of waste silk, which is received from LONDON, and after scouring, combing and spinning, is returned; of wool cards, in which branch considerable improvements have been made by the curious machines invented here; and of fish-hooks. (184–185)

At this point in the Guide , West’s readers have travelled far beyond the sublime landscapes promised at the outset of the text. West’s attention roves over Kendal’s points of entry, the vagaries of its urban topography, the source materials and trade routes of its manufactures and, most surprisingly, its workhouse, which is described jarringly in the language of aesthetic appreciation. It is not uncommon in the tour guides of this period for a place to be introduced via the different routes by which it may be approached. This, in fact, is how Wordsworth begins his own Guide to the Lakes (1810–1835). But what is perhaps remarkable about this passage is the extent to which West’s imagination continues to branch out at further angles, as he follows the northern and then the southern roads into the town. Crossing a bridge, West pauses to name the destinations of ‘three great roads’ which converge there. Later he traces the journey of the waste silk from London to Kendal and back again. And West’s oblique tangents are not solely geographical: in imagining how the addition of a marketplace ‘at the incident’ of two streets might ‘give the town a noble appearance’, he seeks to encompass the counterfactual within the wide scope of his Guide . There is an extreme triangulation of sorts taking place here: West is situating Kendal not only within the geography and economic structure of the British Empire, but within its history: from its ancient origins to its possible futures. In West’s Guide , the towns, villages, and landmarks of the Lakes are not simply labelled and divided up; rather, they are being positioned carefully within the map and story of the British Empire. By folding his account of the Lakes within a narrative of British imperial progress, West is able to resolve the implicit tension between the tour guide’s need to preserve the distinctiveness of England’s regions, with its complicity in the forces of upheaval (tourism, in particular) which threaten that distinctiveness.

Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes adopts a very different position in relation to this tension. Throughout the Guide , suggests Lisa Ottum, Wordsworth’s ‘deep suspicion of tourism’ is reflected in his ‘rejection of the genre [of the tour guide] itself, particularly its conventional gestures toward usability. [ … ] the Guide is not especially conducive to field consultation in the way that, for instance, West’s Guide is. With its focus on history and the harmful effects wrought by “new settlers” to the Lakes, it discourages browsing.’ 16

Ottum reads the Guide ’s simultaneously welcoming and unwelcoming approach towards tourists through Wordsworth’s ‘ambivalent relationship to mass tourism and the genre of travel writing’ (169). I would suggest, however, that it is bound up with a more long-standing paradox in Wordsworth’s attitude towards regionality, that can be detected in his work as early as Lyrical Ballads (1798). This paradox is perhaps most apparent in the fact that he predominantly writes in Standard English for a national audience, while claiming in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads to have adopted the language of ‘low and rustic life’, in part because the isolation and traditional occupations of rural speakers have ensured they speak a ‘plainer and more emphatic language’ than the poets and city dwellers to whom he compares them. 17 Wordsworth’s linguistic balancing act in the Lyrical Ballads has been critiqued repeatedly in the last two centuries, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), 18 and as such it would be redundant to revisit the debate here. Suffice it to say that, for Wordsworth, the desire to (as he saw it) preserve the Lakes’ distinctiveness and the desire to repackage and share its language and landscape for the national good was a lifelong conflict which he never fully resolved. Consider the following passage from the section titled ‘Directions and Information for the Tourist’, in which Wordsworth describes the approach to Ullswater:

The opening on the side of Ullswater Vale, down which this Stream flows, is adorned with fertile fields, cottages, and natural groves, that agreeably unite with the transverse views of the Lake; and the Stream, if followed up after the enclosures are left behind, will lead along bold water-breaks and waterfalls to a silent Tarn in the recesses of Helvellyn. This desolate spot was formerly haunted by eagles, that built in the precipice which forms its western barrier. These birds used to wheel and hover round the head of the solitary angler. It also derives a melancholy interest from the fate of a young man, a stranger, who perished some years ago, by falling down the rocks in his attempt to cross over to Grasmere. His remains were discovered by means of a faithful dog that had lingered here for the space of three months, self-supported, and probably retaining to the last an attachment to the skeleton of its master. 19

As in West, we find here an accumulation of details, both of the expected, picturesque kind as well as the more incongruous variety. And, as West does, Wordsworth traces out the journey that his readers might take in following him to the Lakes. But where Wordsworth breaks with the precedent set by West, and from the conventions of the tour guide more generally, is in his lingering over aspects of the landscape—the loss of the eagles; the mourning of a dog for an unnamed stranger—that are both largely unverifiable and difficult to recover for the casual tourist. On the surface of things, Wordsworth might seem to be appealing to the elegiac impulses of the tourist, in much the same way that tour guides typically do when inviting their readers to visit ruins, graveyards, or sites of historical battles. Yet the past that Wordsworth invokes here is a past from which his readers are shut out: details that are too private, occasional, and ephemeral to constitute local history. In this respect, Wordsworth’s compiling of details functions in an antithetical way to those of other tour guides, insofar as the things described cannot be mapped onto the tourist’s own experience nor do they serve to commoditize the landscape.

Deeper still, there is, in the stories of the eagles and the death of the young man, a warning for tourists, both of the ways in which the ecology of the Lakes is disappearing, and of the hostility of the landscape to over-eager travellers and ‘strangers’. In passages such as these there is not, I would argue, a wholesale rejection of the conventions of the tour guide, but rather a widening of its scope to take in the discontents of tourism. This is a tour guide with not only a conscience, but also a sub-consciousness—for every pleasant ‘transverse view’ there is, so to speak, a skeleton or the ghost of a threatened species which rises up incongruously, in lieu of more tourist-friendly details.

We find a similar ambivalence in a work of dialect literature from the period. Ann Wheeler’s The Westmorland Dialect in Three Familiar Dialogues (1790) can be read as a loose triptych representing three ages of woman: the first dialogue focusing on a married woman with young children; the second featuring elderly or widowed women with adult children; and the third giving voice to two young, unmarried ‘coquets’. Wheeler’s text looks back to earlier dialect writing insofar as it comprises prose dialogues after the fashion of George Meriton’s Yorkshire Dialogue (1683), Andrew Brice’s Exmoor Scolding (1727), and Tim Bobbin’s View of the Lancashire Dialect (1746) (‘Tim Bobbin’ was the pseudonym of John Collier). These earlier texts, consisting as they did of exchanges between two or more speakers, presented themselves as samples or examples of spontaneous, native conversation as it was actually spoken in a particular region. Indeed, in the dedication to the first edition of the Dialogues , Wheeler expresses the hope that her work may ‘share the laurels with Tim Bobbin’. 20 However, the Dialogues also share with Romantic-era texts a tendency to oscillate between the two poles of Romantic regionalism: that is, between the desire to provide a definitive and complete account of a place and a sensitivity to the dislocated and uncanny way in which place was experienced on the ground, as it were.

Notwithstanding the relative obscurity of eighteenth-century dialect writers, both in their own time and since, Wheeler’s work has attracted a degree of critical attention over the course of the last twenty-five years: Janet Sorensen, for instance, has explored the ways in which Wheeler’s Dialogues disrupt the implicitly liberal and capitalist relegation of the provinces (and their dialects) to the past. 21 Daniel DeWispelare has found in Wheeler’s work a powerfully subversive response to patriarchy and linguistic hegemony. Describing a character in Wheeler’s third dialogue, he writes, ‘not only does Wheeler name and describe the violence inherent in women’s lives, she masterfully reverses linguistic privilege and allows Mary to celebrate her own linguistic alterity’. 22

DeWispelare is especially sensitive to the ways in which the Dialogues diverge from the farce of earlier prose dialect works such as Bobbin’s and Brice’s through Wheeler’s sympathetic exploration of the lives of working people, which aims more at pathos than humour. In this reading, Wheeler’s texts are characterized by conflict—a struggle between standard English ‘authority’ and non-standard ‘dissidence’, or between men and women—and DeWispelare tends not to address issues of regionality that do not lend themselves so easily to this dialectical model. Wheeler’s representation of Westmorland dialect is interpreted primarily in light of the difficulty it presents for a (presumably non-local) ‘reader’. Accordingly, DeWispelare chooses not to discuss issues of local identity or the relationship between Wheeler’s writing and the speech sounds of Westmorland to the same extent. In contrast, I would like to suggest that, just as Wheeler’s Dialogues were printed at a local press (as well as in London), and just as a significant proportion of her readers would have lived in the vicinity of Westmorland, so too is the language and the content of the text deeply embedded in the area it represents, and the idea of place more generally.

Consider the distinctive cluster of letters that recurs throughout Wheeler’s Dialogues : the <aa> of words such as ‘maander’ (miss one’s way), ‘knaas’ (knows), and ‘haad’ (hold). At one level, the odd appearance of this sequence of letters on the page marks out its difference from Standard English (there are comparatively few words in standard spelling which feature this cluster). But, at a deeper level still, Wheeler is appealing to local knowledge about the unique sounds of south Westmorland pronunciations, just as earlier and subsequent writers from the area did. Writing of the speech of Cumberland (which borders Westmorland), Simon Dickson Brown in 1899 observed that the <aa> spelling denotes a sound which is ‘most difficult either to inculcate in a non-Cumbrian or [ … ] to eradicate from the speech of a Cumbrian’. 23 If Dickson Brown is to be believed, the vowel sound signified in ‘knaas’ and ‘haad’ had a shibboleth-esque quality, which distinguished speakers of the local dialect from outsiders (although the presence of this spelling in Westmorland writing suggests its provenance was a little broader than Dickson Brown assumed). What is more, in these words Wheeler is appealing to local knowledge of how certain vowels should be pronounced: the shibboleth-like quality of the sound is not inferable from the spelling alone, but acts as a cue for those who are already familiar with Westmorland speech. This is a device common to many works of dialect writing, as Patrick Honeybone, among others, has suggested. 24 It may be the case that, as DeWispelare argues, ‘Wheeler’s dialect functions both as communicative medium and distractive smokescreen’, which helped to obscure some of the more subversive aspects of the Dialogues (108). However, in another sense, the <aa> spelling is the opposite of distracting, sharply focusing, as it does, the attention of local readers on an emblem of what makes their speech collectively distinctive. Alongside the compendious glossary appended to the text, and the rich variety of regional lexis and grammar, respellings such as ‘knaas’ and ‘haad’ aim to capture the richness of Westmorland speech in all of its conversational variety and subtle distinctiveness. Much as West and, in a very different manner, Wordsworth, load their travelogues with the minutiae of local topography or lore, Wheeler’s approach to language seems driven by a comparable tendency towards exhaustiveness.

And yet it would be a mistake to read Wheeler’s writing as a simple assertion or celebration of regional identity and pride, as other examples of vernacular and dialect writing sometimes seem to be (see for instance Joan Beal on Geordie writing 25 ). It is ironic that the first dialogue, titled ‘Upon running away from a bad Husband’, seems to promise a narrative in which a wife escapes from an abusive partner, as this is precisely what the wife in question (Mary) is unable to achieve by the end of the dialogue. At the outset of the text, Mary reveals to her friend, Ann, that she has been physically and psychologically abused by her drunken, philandering husband, who steals the money she earns from spinning and denies her food and new clothes. But her plan to leave Westmorland for ‘LIRPLE’ (Liverpool) and take up work in service is challenged by Ann in the following terms:

Thau tauks terrably, whya thau wod be teerd in a lile Time was tae frae him, what cud tae dea at LIRPLE, nae yan dar tak the in, a Husband has terrable Pawer, nae Justice can bang him, he can dea what he will wie the, he may lick the, nay hoaf kill the, or leaam the, or clam the, naae sell the, an nae yan dar mell on him. (15) [You talk terribly, well you would be tired in the short time were you to go from him, what could you do at Liverpool, no one would dare take you in, a husband has terrible power, no Justice can beat him, he can do what he will with you, he may beat you, nay half kill you, or lame you, or starve you, nay sell you, and no one dare meddle with him.] [my translation]

Throughout the dialogue, Ann is presented as a sympathetic and solicitous friend, whose advice is meant in earnest. Yet in the guidance Ann offers to Mary she reveals the extent to which she has accepted patriarchal oppression. In her study of eighteenth-century court cases surrounding marital violence, Joanne Bailey paints a picture of contemporary life that both supports but also slightly complicates Ann’s point of view. On the one hand, Bailey points out that ‘wife beating ending in death made up an increasing proportion of reported homicides by the end of the [eighteenth] century.’ 26 On the other, the legal examples considered by Bailey reveal ‘that people’s willingness to try and stop violence took precedence over an abusive husband’s claims that his treatment of his wife was a personal matter’ (285–286). Marital violence was widespread and often fatal during this period, and yet protection could sometimes be found either in law or from bystanders. This is not to trivialize the kind of abuse represented in Wheeler’s Dialogues , nor is it to understate the extreme social pressure felt by contemporary women in Mary’s position. On the contrary, it is to show that the fear and despair engendered by marital violence and inequality, as expressed by Ann, exerted a powerful influence on those women’s sense of place, and the possibility of escaping it.

Later in the dialogue, a male stranger appears, whose narrative describing his flight from an abusive employer offers a counterpoint to Ann’s experience. In the course of events described in the stranger’s convoluted story, he narrowly avoids being press-ganged and is threatened with transport by his master. Unlike Mary, who cannot leave her native area without extreme difficulty, the stranger presents an example of a labourer who cannot remain due to the pressures of an excessively punitive and militarized society, which systematically uproots working men from their communities. It is tempting to view the difference between Ann’s and the stranger’s fates as Wheeler tacitly expressing a ‘point about male privilege’: namely, ‘men have options women lack’ (119). Yet to do so would be to overlook the essential similarity that underlies the apparent difference between Ann’s and the stranger’s experiences. As labouring-class people, both lack the means to define a relationship with place on their own terms. Wheeler eschews a sentimental or idealized representation of regional pride and ideas of home, showing instead how working people’s relationship with their place was often one of powerlessness.

So it is that many works of dialect literature embody the broader division in Romantic approaches to regionalism. Like the authors of tour guides, dialect writers employed intensive detail in order to reify the idea of each nominal place having its own distinctive character. By the same token, the social and economic conditions of working-class life were a—if not the —central concern of dialect literature. As such, the realities of emigration and of forced as well as restricted mobility could not help but creep into its pages—those same realities which were unravelling the ties which bound working people to their communities.

Thus far I have considered those texts which lean towards the survey end of the spectrum, notwithstanding the numerous and significant instances in Wordsworth’s Guide and Wheeler’s Dialogues when those survey-esque tendencies are interrupted by moments of uncanniness, discontent, or incongruity. I want now to turn to a text in which the problems and the incoherence of ideas about place are especially pronounced—a text which, with its emphasis on private experience and subjectivity, is closer to the other end of the spectrum.

Dorothy Wordsworth began writing her Grasmere Journal in May 1800, five months after moving into Dove Cottage with her brother, William, in December 1799, and following a lifetime of displacement from one relative’s house to another’s. The return to the Lakes was, in a sense, a homecoming to the broader Lakes region in which she was born. But in the village of Grasmere, at least initially, Dorothy was an outsider, just as she had been at various points in her earlier life. This would not always be the case, and yet it is telling that, in the Grasmere Journal , we find Dorothy registering a noticeable degree of alienation and absence in her encounters with local groups of people. In the following entry, Dorothy describes a funeral which took place on Tuesday 2nd September 1800:

I then went to a funeral at John Dawson’s. About 10 men and 4 women. Bread, cheese, and ale. They talked sensibly and chearfully about common things. The dead person, 56 years of age, buried by the parish. The coffin was neatly lettered and painted black, and covered with a decent cloth. They set the corpse down at the door; and, while we stood within the threshold, the men with their hats off sang with decent and solemn countenances a verse of a funeral psalm. The corpse was then borne down the hill, and they sang till they had passed the Town-End. I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children. When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining, and the prospect looked so divinely beautiful as I never saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, and yet more allied to human life. The green fields, neighbours of the churchyard, were green as possible; and, with the brightness of the sunshine, looked quite gay. I thought she was going to a quiet spot, and I could not help weeping very much. When we came to the bridge, they began to sing again, and stopped during four lines before they entered the churchyard. The priest met us—he did not look as a man ought to do on such an occasion—I had seen him half-drunk the day before in a pot-house. Before we came with the corpse one of the company observed he wondered what sort of cue our Parson would be in! N.B. It was the day after the Fair. 27

It is inevitable that a passage such as this, so rich in the intense feeling and minute details for which Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings are rightly celebrated, would attract critical attention. Kenneth Cervelli has identified in this passage evidence of ‘Dorothy’s communion with Grasmere’s living and dead inhabitants’, which, he argues, ‘is a direct result of her daily participation in its culture of death’. 28 Discussing Dorothy’s reluctance to publish her narrative concerning the death of the Greens, Cervelli describes ‘her deep, sympathetic appreciation of the Grasmere community that represented the only public sphere she cared to know’ (78).

In contrast, I want to offer an alternative reading of this passage, one which emphasizes those moments when the community of Grasmere, and Dorothy’s place in it, seem less secure and more limited than Cervelli suggests. As Cervelli notes, the ceremony described here is in a ‘pauper funeral’ (72), as indicated by Dorothy’s observation that the deceased was ‘buried by the parish’. However, unlike Cervelli, I would suggest that this aspect of the funeral is the key to understanding Dorothy’s description of it.

Although Hurren and King observe there has long been a critical consensus that pauper burials were ‘feared and loathed by those on poor relief and those on its margins’, they also contend that first-hand accounts by the families involved show a more complicated and less stark picture. 29 Even so, their article testifies to a wide variation in practice, depending on the place where the burial took place, the particular overseer in charge of arrangements, and the status of the ‘pauper’ involved. In Hulme, Lancashire, for instance, ‘vagrants’, ‘sojourners’, and ‘stillborn children’ were buried in ‘large open graves’, while ‘most other paupers [ … ] were buried in individual graves in other parts of the churchyard’ (330).

In light of this historical background, Dorothy’s repetition of the word ‘decent’ takes on a new resonance. The fact that she considers it noteworthy that the coffin was covered with a ‘decent cloth’ and that the men sang with ‘decent and solemn countenances’ implies that she was sufficiently aware of the indecency and indignity with which pauper burials were sometimes conducted. Indeed, the feared indecency comes to pass at the end of the anecdote, like the punchline to a joke in poor taste, with the appearance of the hungover priest who looked not ‘as a man ought to do’. The irony of the piece is that the very person appointed to shepherd the community spiritually and morally fails to lead the funeral service of a pauper with any dignity.

Other unsaid things in the passage add further hints that Dorothy held an unidealized view of the Grasmere community—a view that, as Michelle Levy has argued with reference to Dorothy’s Narrative Concerning George and Sarah Green of the Parish of Grasmere (1808), would resurface even after she became firmly embedded in the area. 30 Pamela Woof’s notes to the Oxford Grasmere Journal contain clues as to why ‘there were no near kindred, no children’ present at the funeral: the deceased woman, Susan Shaelock’s ‘ “baseborn daughter” Betty’, had died four years previously, also in a condition of pauperism. 31 It is dangerous to speculate as to why there were ‘no near kindred’ present; it is possible that none remained. Yet it is clear, from William’s poetry alone, that women who had children out of wedlock often suffered from ostracism by the communities in which they lived. Regardless, the general absence of family—whether a husband, in-laws, siblings, or cousins—gives the lie to the stereotypical image of the pre-industrial countryside, in which everyday life happens in the presence of dense kinship networks and inter-dependence. This in turn raises the question of who the mourners were, and precisely how they were connected, if at all, to Susan Shaelock. Similarly, we might ask why Dorothy chose to attend the funeral. There is no explicit indication that she knows any of those present (they are all unnamed, as is the deceased) or that she interacted directly with any of the mourners. By way of comparison, consider the highly individualized way in which Dorothy renders her interactions with outsiders and vagrants elsewhere in the Grasmere Journal . That she and other villagers did attend the funeral and that it was conducted (for the most part) with dignity is, in one sense, evidence of strong community feeling and a shared sense of responsibility to the dead in Grasmere, irrespective of their links to Shaelock. Yet Dorothy’s elisions produce the curious effect of depersonalizing the event. Perhaps the most uncanny aspect of this passage is the narrator, who renders herself as a sort of ghostly presence, observing everything but participating in little.

In light of the subtly alienated perspective that Dorothy brings to her observations of the Grasmere community, other details cannot help but take on added weight. The men ‘sang till they had passed the Town-End’, then resumed their song by the bridge and stopped once more as they entered the churchyard. The deeply communal act of singing in unison is a symbol of the village’s togetherness; the moments when it stops, always taking place at thresholds (most notably the ‘Town-End’, which encompassed the boundary between Grasmere and Rydal and was, incidentally, where Dove Cottage was situated 32 ), are likewise a reminder of the limits of togetherness. At points such as this in the Grasmere Journal , community is not so much imagined as it is see-through: web-like both in its points of connection as well as in its fragile porousness. The social networks, the regular first-hand interactions, the interdependence that constitute community are present. But the lived experience of living in the midst of that community brings regular, in some cases disconcerting, reminders of its limits.

There is, nonetheless, another side to Dorothy’s regionalism. This is the side that, as Sara Crangle puts it, has a propensity to ‘examine the minutiae of circumscribed locales’. 33 It is, likewise, the part that, according to Robin Jarvis, drove Dorothy’s excursions around the area on foot: ‘walking’, in the Grasmere Journals and elsewhere, had the function of ‘reaffirming and deepening a sense of belonging to the local environment in which a sheltered space has been discovered.’ 34 One need only visit Grasmere in the twenty-first century, in particular Dove Cottage, to witness the extent to which Dorothy’s daily accounts of the ‘minutiae’ of domestic and local life have helped to shape the identity of the village as a heritage site and tourist destination. In their way, the Grasmere Journals have served to reify the idea of Grasmere as a place, while simultaneously encouraging mobility to and from the village, just as the more obviously survey-esque tour guides were doing at the time.

Dorothy’s tendency to shift between the two modes—between description and estrangement—reminds us that Romantic regionalism is to be found, not in one or the other extreme, but in the oscillation between the two. In different ways, the same ambivalence can be found in William’s Guide to the Lakes and Wheeler’s Westmorland Dialogues and, what is more, the English prose writing of the wider Romantic period. By necessity, this chapter has limited its attention to the Lakes, but instructive examples can be found throughout the counties of England. Consider John Clare: a writer whose work has both shaped the idea of Northamptonshire (in particular its dialect) while, at the same time, giving full voice to the confused, painful, and disoriented way in which places were often experienced (most notably in the Journey out of Essex , composed in 1841). Or take the less obvious example of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830), which records in detail the farming activity and cost of living in the villages of the south of England, while relaying stories of the many tenants and workers uprooted from their homes by the machinations of landlords (and others). Here, as elsewhere, in the world of nonfiction Romantic prose, the two impulses, like William Blake’s two classes of men, the Prolific and the Devourer, are revealed as irreconcilable but interdependent opposites: one creating the idea of a place and, in so doing, driving upheaval, the other absorbing the psychological burden of provincial life at the turn of the nineteenth century.

1   Nicholas Roe , ‘Introduction’, in English Romantic Writers and the West Country , ed. Nicholas Roe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–11 , 4.

2   Jonathan Bate , Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 2013), 85 , 92.

3   Simon Kövesi , John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–10 .

  David Higgins , ‘Nature Writing’, this volume, chapter 11 , p. 196.

5   Fiona Stafford , ‘England and Englishness’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism , ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 91–105 , 96.

6   Jane Hodson and Alex Broadhead , ‘Developments in Literary Dialect Representation in British Fiction 1800–1836’, Language and Literature , 22/6 (2013), 315–322 .

  Anthony Jarrells , ‘Regionalism: Scotland’, this volume, chapter 14 , p. 247.

8   David Higgins , Romantic Englishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, 1780 – 1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4 .

9   Michael Silverstein , ‘Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities’, Annual Review of Anthropology , 27 (1998), 401–426 , 405.

10   Celeste Langan , Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) .

Nicholas Roe, ed., English Romantic Writers and the West Country .

12   Keith Hanley , ‘The Imaginative Visitor: Wordsworth and the Romantic Construction of Literary Tourism in the Lake District’, in The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination , eds John K. Walton and Jason Wood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 113–131 , 123.

13   John Vaughan , The English Guide Book c.1780 – 1870 (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1974), 58 .

14   Thomas West , The antiquities of Furness; or, an account of the Royal Abbey of St. Mary (London: T. Spilsbury and J. Johnson, 1774) , n.p.

15   Thomas West , A Guide to the Lakes: dedicated to all lovers of landscape studies, and to all who have visited, or intend to visit the lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London: printed for Richardson and Urquhat, 1778), 1 .

16   Lisa Ottum , ‘Discriminating Vision: Rereading Place in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes ’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism , 34/3 (2012), 167–184 , 170.

Wordsworth, Prose , i. 124.

Coleridge, Biographia , ii. 40–106.

Wordsworth, Prose , ii. 167.

20   Ann Wheeler , The Westmorland Dialect, in Three Familiar Dialogues (Kendal: James Ashburner, 1790), p. vi .

21   Janet Sorensen , Strange Vernaculars: How Eighteenth-Century Cant, Provincial Languages, and Nautical Jargon Became English (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 217–219 .

22   Daniel DeWispelare , ‘Dissidence in Dialect: Ann Wheeler’s Westmorland Dialogues’, Studies in Romanticism , 54 (2015), 123 .

23   Simon Dickson Brown , ‘Phonology of the Cumbrian Dialect’, in Glossary of the Cumberland Dialect , eds William Dickinson and Edward Prevost (London: Bemrose, 1899), p. xix .

24   Patrick Honeybone , ‘Which Phonological Features Get Represented in Dialect Writing? Answers and Questions from Three Types of Liverpool English Texts’, in Dialect Writing and the North of England , eds Patrick Honeybone and Warren Maguire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 211–242 , 219.

25   Joan Beal , ‘From Geordie Riley to Viz : Popular Literature in Tyneside English’, Language and Literature , 9/4 (2000), 343–59 , 354.

26   Joanne Bailey , ‘“I dye [sic] by Inches”: Locating Wife Beating in the Concept of a Privatization of Marriage and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England’, Social History , 31/3 (2006), 273–294 , 275.

Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals , i. 59–60.

28   Kenneth Cervelli , Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 78 .

29   Elizabeth Hurren and Steve King , ‘“Begging for a Burial”: Form, Function and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Pauper Burial’, Social History , 30/3 (2005), 321–341 , 322.

30   Michelle Levy , ‘The Wordsworths, the Greens, and the Limits of Sympathy’, Studies in Romanticism , 42/4 (2003), 541–563 .

31   Pamela Woof , ‘Explanatory Notes’, in Dorothy Wordsworth , The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 182 .

‘Grasmere Town End Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan’, Lake District National Park , < https://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/planning/conservationareas/grasmeretownendca > [accessed: 15 June 2022].

33   Sara Crangle , ‘ “Regularly Irregular … Dashing Waters”: Navigating the Stream of Consciousness in Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journals ’, Journal of Narrative Theory , 34/2 (2004), 146–172 , 146.

34   Robin Jarvis , Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 164 .

Further Reading

Gilroy, Amanda , ed., Green and Pleasant Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside (Leuven: Peeters, 2004 ).

Google Scholar

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Hodson, Jane , ed., Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017 ).

Sale, Roger , Closer to Home: Writers and Places in England, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 ).

Stafford, Fiona , Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 ).

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Revitalizing Language Education: An Exploratory Study on the Innovative Use of Mobile Applications in English Language Teaching at a State University in Vietnam

• First Online: 23 May 2024

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• Nghi Tin Tran 5 ,
• Phuc Huu Tran 6 &
• Vu Phi Ho Pham 7  

Part of the book series: New Language Learning and Teaching Environments ((NLLTE))

This study investigated the use of mobile applications as an innovative tool in English Language Teaching (ELT) at a Vietnamese state university. Its aim was to determine whether these applications could improve students’ English language skills, engagement, and motivation, as well as how they impacted teachers’ expectations. The research evaluated the effectiveness of mobile apps in the learning process and their role in promoting a student-centered education system. Through questionnaires and focus group interviews with language teachers and students, the study gathered both qualitative and quantitative data to understand the perceptions of both groups regarding the benefits and challenges of mobile app usage in language learning.

The findings suggested that mobile applications fostered an interactive and engaging learning environment, which could significantly enhance students’ attitudes towards learning English. The study emphasized the importance of incorporating technology into teaching methods to meet the needs of modern language learners. The authors recommended that language educators and policymakers embrace technological advancements in teaching to improve language education outcomes, citing the potential of mobile apps to create a dynamic and effective learning space.

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Nghi Tin Tran

Faculty of English, University of Foreign Language Studies, The University of Da Nang, Da Nang City, Vietnam

Phuc Huu Tran

Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Vu Phi Ho Pham

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Hayo Reinders

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Appendix 1: Online Survey

Part 1: demographic information.

Age: ____________________

Occupation: ____________________

Current Language Learning Status:

Intermediate

How long have you been learning this language? ____________________

What is your primary reason for learning this language? ____________________

Part 2: Mobile App Usage

Have you used a mobile app for language learning before?

If yes, how often do you use the mobile app for language learning?

What type of language learning activities do you engage in using the mobile app?

Listening and speaking exercises

Reading and writing exercises

Grammar and vocabulary exercises

Cultural activities

Games and simulations

Have you used a mobile app that integrates emerging technologies, such as AI and gamification, for language learning?

Part 3: Perceptions of Mobile Apps for Language Learning

How useful do you find the mobile app for language learning?

Very useful

Somewhat useful

Not very useful

Not at all useful

How effective do you think the mobile app is in improving your language skills?

Very effective

Somewhat effective

Not very effective

Not at all effective

How engaging do you find the mobile app for language learning?

Very engaging

Somewhat engaging

Not very engaging

Not at all engaging

How well does the mobile app adapt to your learning pace and style?

Somewhat well

Not very well

Not at all well

How well does the mobile app integrate emerging technologies, such as AI and gamification, into the language learning experience?

Part 4: Open-Ended Questions

What do you like about using the mobile app for language learning?

What do you dislike about using the mobile app for language learning?

What improvements would you suggest for the mobile app to enhance the language learning experience?

Appendix 2: Focus Group Interview

Part 1: introduction and background information.

Can you tell us a little about your background and experience with language learning and teaching?

How familiar are you with the use of mobile apps for language learning?

Can you describe your experience using mobile apps for language learning?

How often do you use mobile apps for language learning?

What features do you look for in a mobile app for language learning?

Part 3: Integration of Emerging Technologies

How do you believe the integration of emerging technologies, such as AI and gamification, enhances language learning in mobile apps?

Can you provide an example of a mobile app that effectively integrates emerging technologies for language learning?

Part 4: Perceptions of Mobile Apps for Language Learning.

How do you believe mobile apps compare to traditional language learning methods (e.g. textbooks, language classes, etc.) in terms of effectiveness?

What do you see as the strengths of using mobile apps for language learning?

What do you see as the weaknesses of using mobile apps for language learning?

Part 5: Future Use of Mobile Apps for Language Learning

Do you plan to continue using mobile apps for language learning in the future?

If yes, what features or technologies would you like to see integrated into mobile apps for language learning in the future?

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About this chapter

Tran, N.T., Tran, P.H., Pham, V.P.H. (2024). Revitalizing Language Education: An Exploratory Study on the Innovative Use of Mobile Applications in English Language Teaching at a State University in Vietnam. In: Phung, L., Reinders, H., Pham, V.P.H. (eds) Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching. New Language Learning and Teaching Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46080-7_10

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