This paper presents another stage in a series of research efforts by the authors to develop an experience-connected mobile language learning environment, bridging formal and informal learning. Building on a study in which the authors tried to connect classroom learning (of German in Japan) with learners' real life experiences abroad by having smartphones detect the learners' location and supply them with multimedia content matching their real-time communicative situation, the authors developed a hybrid language learning environment supporting different types of learning. Based on observations that learners tended to use resources rather for preparatory or retrospective learning, and on considerations about the potential of social media as a space for informal language learning, the authors added a feature that supports learners when writing a social networking service (SNS) post about their everyday experiences abroad. Help is offered based on the analysis of the learners' geolocational position -hinting to what situation they might want to write about-and on the text they already entered. Based on these data, they are provided with help in the form of vocabulary and/or model texts.

This paper presents the prototype of a Mobile Language Learning Environment (MLLE) allowing learners of German at a Japanese university to map classroom learning content onto the pathways of their everyday lives, turning places they come by into mnemonic loci, and thus changing their daily commute into a learning trail. Even though the evaluation based on learners' self-reports could not confirm the assumption that this type of MLLE supports the use of the loci method for all learners, it allows the conclusion that at least for some learners mnemonic mapping with mobile devices might lead to changes in learning awareness and an expansion of strategy knowledge.

The authors present a project that aims at understanding the way language learners write in social media in their every day lives using the target language. How do our students proceed when writing a Social Network Site (SNS) post? What resources do they use for references on word, sentences and text level? By answering these and related questions through extensive collection of empirical data in an analytic learning environment, the design of which is the next step of this project, the authors aim at creating a comprehensive resource that supports different approaches to writing in social media. In the projects' first step, which the authors will lay out in this paper, writing processes of a small number of informants were closely analyzed using experiments, interviews and self-reports. The findings showed considerable differences of resource management between students with different backgrounds in formal learning and revealed a differentiation into 'public' and 'private' space of informal writing in social media, that influenced students' choices regarding the degree of formal elaboration (with respect to correctness) of their texts.