| Summary: | 碩士 === 亞洲大學 === 外國語文學系 === 106 === Integration of idioms is essential to reach the higher English expressive levels, especially for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners who want to achieve high English proficiency level. However, learning English idioms is the challenge to both English instructors and learners because of their complex content and context. Although mobile assisted language learning (MALL) is omnipresent and widely available in higher education, most of them are for vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop an animation-based application that contains instructional videos for learning idiomatic expressions, which is called “My English Idiom Learning Assistant” (MEILA), and to explore the different learning behaviors that influenced learner outcomes in different conditions of learning motivation and anxiety.
The research goal of the current study was to improve learners’ idiomatic understanding via MEILA. Furthermore, in order to explore the relationship between the learning outcomes and the learning behaviors of MEILA, the researcher accessed users’ learning logs from the database of MEILA. The participants consisted of 59 English major freshmen from two English conversation classes in one private university in central Taiwan. Students experienced the learning activities in three weeks. The researcher adopted multiple sources for the study, including pre-/post-tests on idiomatic understanding, questionnaire surveys, and in-depth interviews.
The results revealed that MEILA significantly enhanced students’ idiomatic learning outcomes, improved their learning motivation and reduced their learning anxiety. The sequential analysis also provides language instructors an example of monitoring the learning behaviors to improve teaching materials or methods. The findings may stimulate more MALL researchers, English instructors, and app designers to create an innovative learning environment with mobile for Taiwanese learners.
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