Effectiveness of Mobile Applications in Vocabulary Teaching

Year 2016, Volume: 7 Issue: 1, 47 - 59, 01.03.2016

Ahmet Basal Selahattin Yilmaz Asli Tanriverdi Lutfiye Sari

Abstract

Smartphones are increasingly becoming an ordinary part of our daily lives. With their remarkable capacity, applications used in these devices are extremely varied. In terms of language teaching, the use of these applications has opened new windows of opportunity, innovatively shaping the way instructors teach and students learn. This 4 week-long study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a mobile application on teaching 40 figurative idioms from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) corpus compared to traditional activities. Quasi-experimental research design with pretest and posttest was employed to determine the differences between the scores of the control (n=25) and the experimental group (n=25) formed with convenience sampling. Results indicate that participants in the experimental group performed significantly better in the posttest, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mobile application used in this study on learning idioms. The study also provides recommendations towards the use of mobile applications in teaching vocabulary.

Keywords

English language teaching, Figurative idioms, Mobile learning, Mobile applications, Vocabulary teaching

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• Correspondence: Ahmet Basal, Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Language
• Education, Faculty of Education, Yildiz Technical University, Davutpasa Campus, Esenler, Istanbul, Turkey