Abstract
Employment of idioms is essential to reach higher English expressive levels, especially for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners. However, English idioms are challenging for both instructors and learners because the complex content of idioms depends on understanding their cultural context. Most mobile language applications are for vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop an animation/video-based application, “My English Idiom Learning Assistant” (MEILA), to explore the different idiom learning behaviors, as well as the relationships of their learning behaviors to MEILA. To explore the relationship between the learning outcomes and the learning behaviors, the researcher used logs from the MEILA database. The participants consisted of 59 freshmen from two English conversation classes in one private university in central Taiwan. Students experienced the learning activities over 3 weeks. The researcher adopted idiomatic understanding pre- and posttests for the study as well as in-depth interviews. The results revealed that MEILA significantly enhanced idiomatic learning outcomes. The sequential analysis used provides language instructors an example of monitoring learning behaviors to improve teaching materials and methods. The findings may stimulate more mobile-assist language learning (MALL) researchers, English instructors, and app designers to create innovative mobile environments for English idiomatic learning.
Highlights
Idioms are frequently used in daily English conversation because they enrich the content of the communication and enable the speakers to express themselves clearly (Thyab, 2016)
The pre- and posttests of idiom comprehension were designed by the researcher to answer Research Question 1, based on the content in My English Idiom Learning Assistant” (MEILA)
The results showed that the Taiwanese students in this study liked to learn these English idioms and other knowledge through self-learning with MEILA
Summary
Idioms are frequently used in daily English conversation because they enrich the content of the communication and enable the speakers to express themselves clearly (Thyab, 2016). Employment of idioms is vital to reach the higher English expressive levels (Xie, 2017), especially for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners who endeavor to achieve fluency comparable with what native speakers need for conversation and daily interaction (Cooper, 1999). English courses in Taiwan, mostly focus on vocabulary and grammar acquisition because it is considered to be time-consuming to teach students the complex content of “the cultural, often figurative, indirect, multipleword nature of idioms and their rigid structure” (Asl, 2013; Liontas, 2017) and because non-native speakers of English may not be confident of understanding idioms well enough to explain them. MALL technology that can be adapted to language learning includes podcasting, social networking, course
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