Use of mobile phones in language learning: Developing effective instructional materials

Abstract

With its widespread use and its features and functions such as mobility, reachability, localization, and personalization, mobile phone technology offers a great potential in learning environments. With this consideration, our first and foremost aim in this study has been to make use of this profound interest and potential, and contribute to the efforts to enhance existing educational practices, particularly in the developing regions of the world. Therefore, we developed instructional materials to be delivered through mobile phones operated in second generation GSM technology in order to improve English language learners' vocabulary acquisition. The multimedia messages in this study allowed students to see the definitions of words, example sentences, related visual representations, and pronunciations. After students finished reading multimedia messages, interactive short message service (SMS) quizzes for testing their learning were sent. This paper suggests some important points to consider while creating MMS content and a SMS quiz system for educational purposes.