Bite-sized

Day 1: Thursday, 12 September

In this session, we will share our experiences of using the Lang-Track App to study international students’ online and in-person language use, including use of their first language as well as English, while studying in the UK. The Lang-Track App (Arndt et al., 2023) is an open source smartphone app that allows researchers to administer short surveys on a schedule over a specified period of time, e.g. three surveys per day for a week. As such, the Lang-Track App facilitates experience sampling (Csíkszentimihályi & Larson, 1987), the study of individuals’ daily behaviour. Having introduced experience sampling and explored the advantages of using the app over other approaches to experience sampling such as diaries, we share our experiences of setting up the open source app on our own servers and demonstrate how the app works. The latter will cover the various levels of approval that were required including ethical approval, Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and IT security review as well as the support our team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) provided navigating this process and implementing the software. We then introduce our study in which we validated this approach to data collection against one-shot self-report questionnaires, the most commonly used approach to documenting language input and interaction in study abroad contexts (Mitchell, 2023). We conclude the session with suggestions for other questions the app might be used to explore in applied linguistics, education and the social sciences more broadly, before opening the discussion about the value of the approach to experience sampling and using open source tools for data collection.