Iranian EFL learners are let to take the lead by mobile language learning

This paper describes an exploratory study that was conducted at Arsses, a private English language institute, using a mobile application designed to support situated mobile language learning. The mobile-enabled activity, called Photofit, supports a repository for words and expressions that can be shared by several users. Learners learned new vocabulary and idioms in different ways. They saw suitable contexts, in their daily life, which matched with the vocabulary or idioms they acquired. Taking pictures of these contexts, they tried to illustrate the newly learned phrases. Learners made sentences to describe the photo by using the words and phrases they learned. Using their mobile device, they shared a website with their friends to which they uploaded their photos and sentences. Sharing the data helped the learners to review the vocabulary knowledge and also to self-edit the sentences. Having an access to the photos and sentences provided by others, learners had the chance to reflect on their peers’ language production. In this way, the learners had a conscious focus on the appropriate language use and usage. They had an opportunity of not only correcting and revising their peers’ sentences but also commenting on photos uploaded by others, which created a humorous and funny situation. All these activities were done by cell phone. The teachers initially believed that the mobile-enabled activity will be beneficial for learning collocations and phrases in English. The study revealed that Photofit is beneficial for supporting learning in several areas, collaboration among students and ownership of the knowledge leading to retention of the knowledge. It also highlighted how the technology stimulated discussions about the cultural aspects of languages. This paper presents an overview of the exploratory study and the observations.

کلیدواژه ها:

Mobile Language Learning ، Collaboration ، collocations ، Language and Culture ، student-centered