A Comparative Study On Vocabulary Learning With Mobile Phone And Paper Dictionaries

Today, mobile phones have been widely used and become an indispensable tool in daily life for most people. The author has noticed a phenomenon that college students are using mobile phone dictionaries widely when they learn new words in English. Although some MALL (Mobile Assisted Language Learning) researches have been conducted, few researches are found on either mobile phone or paper dictionary uses for vocabulary learning. This study aims to investigate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners'vocabulary learning in readings with mobile phone and paper dictionaries in a way of maximizing the effects of L2 vocabulary learning for educational purposes. Owing to scarcity of such studies in MALL, the author targets at supplementing and refreshing this domain to bring about the organic combination of the traditional pedagogy with the new technology.The participants were 99 college freshmen who majored in English. They were divided into 3 groups:one using mobile phone dictionaries; one using paper dictionaries; one as the control group. A language-proficiency test, two vocabulary pre-and post-tests, and two questionnaires were used for data collection.This paper contains six chapters. The first chapter is introduction, which illustrates the research background, purposes, and significance. The second chapter is literature review, which provides working definitions of key terms and a survey of the related MALL researches in vocabulary learning. The third chapter is methodology, which talks about the participants, instruments, and procedures. The forth chapter is about the major findings of this study. The fifth chapter is discussion, followed by the six chapter, conclusion. Finally, grounded on the findings, the implications for potential research directions, pedagogical improvement and self-study techniques are discussed.