Abstract

In this study, the participants learned English as a foreign language (EFL) in the classroom and then worked on five learning tasks to apply their newly learned knowledge to unfamiliar environments. The participants took photos of people, objects, situations or scenarios and described them in detail using a mobile learning system. Familiarization strategies were developed for the participants to increase their knowledge of strange environments. We aimed to test the effectiveness of the familiarization strategies on learning performance in the mobile-assisted language-learning context. To this end, an experiment was carried out with fifty participants who were assigned either to the experimental or control groups. The participants in the former used the familiarization strategies, whereas the participants in the latter did not. We compared the learning performance of the participants in the two groups based on the scores of pre- and posttests with phrase translation, sentence translation and writing items. We also compared the EFL writing quality of the two groups on five tasks with respect to the amount, vocabulary, grammar, content, origination and creativity dimensions. The results of the pre/posttest comparison showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group on the writing item only. The results showed that the writing quality of the experimental group on the five tasks was significantly better than that of the control group in all of the six dimensions. In addition, all of the participants had positive perceptions of the usefulness of our learning system to assist their EFL learning in unfamiliar environments. The results suggest that familiarization strategies can significantly improve EFL learning performance in unfamiliar environments.

摘要

在这项研究中，参与者在课堂上学习英语作为外语 (EFL)，然后完成五项学习任务，将他们新学到的知识应用到陌生的环境中。参与者拍摄人物、物体、情况或场景的照片，并使用移动学习系统对其进行详细描述。为参与者制定了熟悉策略，以增加他们对陌生环境的了解。我们的目的是测试熟悉策略在移动辅助语言学习环境中对学习表现的有效性。为此，对 50 名被分配到实验组或对照组的参与者进行了一项实验。前者的参与者使用熟悉策略，而后者的参与者则没有。我们根据前测和后测的短语翻译、句子翻译和写作项目的分数，比较了两组参与者的学习表现。我们还从数量、词汇、语法、内容、来源和创造力维度比较了两组在五个任务上的 EFL 写作质量。前后测比较结果显示，实验组仅在写作项目上优于对照组。结果表明，实验组在五个任务上的写作质量在六个维度均显着优于对照组。此外，所有参与者都对我们的学习系统在帮助他们在陌生环境中学习 EFL 的有用性有积极的看法。