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Being able to communicate in foreign languages, along with the remaining key competences for lifelong learning, are of special significance for upper-secondary school students - soon-to-be tertiary education students and employees. Although Polish educational authorities have made efforts to account for this need in the Core Curriculum for Modern Languages, the provisions are pursued with difficulty in school practice. The aim of this paper is to address this challenge by exploring and evaluating the feasibility and student-participant perceptions of urban gaming in school settings as a didactic tool that facilitates language education, as well as digital, social, and learning to learn skills development in an upper-secondary school. Accordingly, the paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a technology assisted urban game named 'As it once was in Cracow—discovering the history of the city', developed for a group of Polish upper-secondary school students (N = 25) from Warsaw. The results provide evidence for student-perceived educational gains with regard to the development of skills such as teamwork, digital literacy, the English language, and content (history) knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most students of English as a foreign language (EFL) lack sufficient opportunities to practice their English-speaking skills. However, the recent development of social-networking sites (SNSs) and mobile learning, and especially mobile-assisted language learning, represents new opportunities for these learners to practice speaking English in a meaningful way. This study integrated a mobile SNS into first-grade EFL classes in China, with the aim of determining its effects on the students’ speaking skills. Two classes were recruited, one as a control group that did not use the SNS, and the other as the experimental group, which did. While both classes’ speaking skills improved between pretest and posttest, the gains in English fluency by the experimental group were significantly larger. Progress in accuracy and pronunciation, on the other hand, were similar across the two groups. These findings are discussed in relation to specific characteristics of SNSs and mobile learning that enable learners to speak in low-stress, situated contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]