An Investigation On The Use Of Mobile Learning In English Majors' Vocabulary Learning

Nowadays,mobile learning is currently receiving an increasing amount of attention in learning English,especially in vocabulary learning.The 21 st century is a knowledge-centered informational era.With the development of science and technology,the use of Internet has become so popular that everyone has the chance to use it everywhere,especially for those who have personal computers and mobile devices.Though there are lots of researches about mobile learning,few of them are about learning vocabulary in English.Thus,the purpose of this research is to know the situation of the use of mobile learning in English majors' vocabulary learning and to summarize the suggestions and assistance that English majors needed in their vocabulary learning when they use mobile devices.The practical values of this research will be shown in knowing the basic situation of the use of mobile learning in English majors' vocabulary learning as well as their attitudes toward mobile learning and their difficulties in using it.There are three research questions:(1)What is the situation of the use of mobile learning in English majors' vocabulary learning?(2)What factors influence students' use of mobile learning in English vocabulary?(3)What are students' attitudes toward mobile learning?Questionnaires from 156 English majors in 6 universities in Inner Mongolia served as the primary tool to collect data.Follow-up interviews were then conducted with the research subjects.These two kinds of research methods were employed mainly because the research was an investigation of knowing the basic situation of most people.The subjects were all English majors from the third and fourth year in 6 universities in Inner Mongolia.There were 113 valid questionnaires and 7 interviews.The data have been processed by SPSS 21 and Excel 2016.Findings from the study revealed that:(1)Most English majors in Inner Mongolia have had some experience in using mobile devices to learn English vocabulary.(2)A number of factors that appeared to influence students' use of mobile learning were identified as: the Internet speed,the convenience of getting vocabulary resources and the authenticity and authority of English vocabulary learning applications.(3)Nearly all of the research subjects were optimistic toward the future development of mobile learning and they hold the opinion that mobile learning will be more and more popular in the near future.The results of this study contributed to an understanding of the present situation of students' use of mobile devices when learning vocabulary.Additionally,practical suggestions for future researches were also identified.