As a result of the rushed transition to remote teaching because of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers have suddenly been forced to design mobile-assisted language learning (MALL; m-learning) activities, mostly for the first time in their careers. However, it is imperative that instructors realize that the challenge is greater than simply converting paper-based assignments into a digital format. There has been very little research done examining the cognitive effects of writing on a smartphone, compared to writing on paper. The current study therefore sought to examine how recollection of content differed depending on the medium used for notetaking. A population of 138 Japanese university students of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) were asked to transcribe a short text, either by paper or by smartphone, and then quizzed on the content immediately afterwards. Students who wrote the text by hand were found to have significantly greater recollection of the content compared to those who had ‘tapped’ on smartphones. These results follow precursor research which indicated that Japanese students compose significantly slower on their phones in English (Lee, 2020b), and wrote significantly less in writing tasks (Lee, 2019, Lee, 2020) than handwriting counterparts.

由于COVID-19大流行，急需过渡到远程教学，教师突然被迫设计了移动辅助语言学习（MALL; m-learning）活动，这在职业生涯中是第一次。但是，当务之急是，教师必须意识到挑战不仅仅是将基于纸质的作业转换为数字格式的挑战。与在纸上书写相比，很少有研究检查在智能手机上书写的认知效果。因此，当前的研究试图检查内容的回忆如何根据记笔记所用的媒体而有所不同。138名日本大学生使用英语作为外国语言（EFL），他们被要求用纸质或智能手机来抄写简短的文字，然后立即查询内容。与那些在智能手机上“轻拍”的学生相比，用手写的文本的学生被发现对内容的记忆力要大得多。这些结果是在先驱研究之后得出的，该研究表明日本学生的英语手机书写速度明显变慢（Lee，2020b），并且在写作任务上的书写（Lee，2019，Lee，2020）比手写的要少得多。