Learning Spanish Reading In An Augmented-reality Application

Learning a new language necessarily requires learning its vocabulary,which often begins with obtaining knowledge of fundamental words and establishing connections between the words,their concepts,and their visual representations in real life in order to recognize or reproduce the verbal and written forms of these words at a later time.Reading the spelling of a word is normally an indispensable part of second language vocabulary acquisition,and also an important indicator of a person's literacy in a foreign language.The pedagogy of L2 word reading has long been dominated by the traditional classroom instruction led by teachers and assisted by the showing of picture cards and verbal drilling of pronunciations,whereas the advancement of augmented reality(AR)technology has allowed second language learners to acquire word reading in a visually and operationally novel way and has in fact expedited the emergence and usage of a vast number of educational products at present days.On the other hand,empirical studies on the actual effectiveness of AR in language education and especially word reading acquisition have not been able to keep up with this trend of AR,leaving the passions of consumers about AR-assisted language learning academically unaccounted for.In order to produce evidence of the effect of augmented reality assisted language learning,the present study recruited 30 Chinese graduate students and asked them to learn a group of Spanish vocabulary in five days.During each day of the training period,they completed a 15-minute training session of Spanish vocabulary in a picture-word association paradigm(mimicking traditional classroom instruction,known as the Baseline or BS mode)and another 15-minute training session of AR-assisted word learning,the two of which were then followed by a memory test on word reading recognition.After the last training session on the fifth day,all participants finished an immediate post-test on vocabulary knowledge.In order to check on the extent of preservation of the word reading they obtained during training,we invited the participants to come back and finish two more delayed post-tests,respectively after five days and three months.Repeated measures analyses showed no significant differences between AR and BS learning tasks either in memory tests during training or in post-tests.However,further discoveries were made in two distinctive aspects after a broader sweep of data.First,during training,the learning frequency under AR condition proved to be lower than that under BS condition.Second,during post-tests,the learning efficiency under AR condition proved to be higher than that under BS condition.Furthermore,after comparing the participants' performance in 3 post-tests in response to learned pictures and new pictures,we found a significant difference between RTs of AR and BS in terms of recognition,which showed that AR could effectively reduce the time needed for L2 word reading recognition in both old and new contexts.In the course of the above analysis,we also noticed the lack of a main effect of the Material factor in recognition post-tests.This suggested that there was no significant difference between old and new Material conditions,which meant that the participants under both AR and BS tasks could generalize the word concepts and apply them with equal effectiveness and efficiency.These results contributed new insights into the positive correlation between AR's effect on learning frequency and efficiency and AR's elevation of motivation,concentration and satisfaction as testified in several previous studies.However,this study did not find much statistical support for AR's effect on achieving better learning outcomes,which remained unclear.In general,this study provided empirical evidence in favor of applying AR technology to L2 word reading acquisition and a new guiding perspective on integrating augmented reality technology into educational tools and products in the area of second language acquisition.