Effectiveness Of Using Mobile Phone Application On Vocabulary Learning Among University Business English Majors

With the advancement of mobile technology in the 21 st century,mobile learning has become more and more popular worldwide.In fact,mobile learning has been greatly welcomed in the field of foreign language learning.Mobile assisted language learning(MALL)has currently attracted an increasing amount of attention in the literature in second language acquisition.The present study responded the trend and identified a key point in this theme by investigating the effectiveness of mobile assisted vocabulary learning in the field of second language acquisition.By and large,this study compared the effectiveness of WeChat based way of vocabulary learning with that of traditional paper based way of vocabulary learning to see whether these methods are practical and which one is more effective on vocabulary learning and long-term retention.This study also aimed to explore how learners in the experimental group perceived the usefulness of mobile assisted vocabulary learning.A mixed method approach was applied in this study,involving a quasi-experiment and a questionnaire.64 Chinese EFL learners who were first-year university students majoring in Business English from two intact classes of the School of Business at Xi'an International Studies University(XISU)were recruited and be divided into the experimental group and the control group for convenience in this study.An independent samples t-test performed on the groups' vocabulary pretest scores presented no significant difference between the two groups in terms of vocabulary ability prior to the experiment.Thereafter,participants in both groups were required to take different treatments for two weeks and to take an immediate test,and a delayed post-test another two weeks later.After this,the experimental group answered the questions on the questionnaire.The test scores of these tests were analyzed and compared.Results of the study illustrated a significant difference arisen between the experimental group and the control group,and the experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-test and the delayed post-test.The results revealed that learning vocabulary via mobile phone application WeChat is more effective than learning vocabulary via paper printed materials and mobile assisted vocabulary learning is also effective on vocabulary retention.Besides,results of the questionnaire administrated after the delayed post-test for the experimental group indicated positive learner attitudes towards mobile assisted vocabulary learning.The findings of this study contribute to a profound understanding of mobile assisted language learning especially vocabulary learning in the field of second language acquisition.Practical suggestions for pedagogy and future research were also identified.