The applications and effects of learning English through augmented reality: a case study of Pokémon Go

Abstract

The rise of augmented reality hits the world of Information, Communication and Technology which brings about the booming phenomenon of mobile games. One of hot mobile game with the successful application of augmented reality is Pokémon Go, issued in August 2016. The uses of augmented reality not only give the gamers a new kind experience to learn new technology, but also provide a new way for teachers and learners to benefit the origins of English and its meanings of each pocket monster. Each pocket monster stands for a new word that is created by its founder. In each new word, the uses of prefix, root and suffix have been established and named, as the single-word utterances of the pokémon names are the sentences. Hence, this article aims at (1) the overview of augmented reality and educations, (2) the applications of augmented reality into the mobile games, (3) the uses of prefix, root and suffix in learning English and pokémon languages, and (4) the experiments. A total number of 61 students were divided into the experimental group and the control group. The questionnaires, descriptive statistics, a paired-sample t-test, one sample t-test, and ANCOVA were employed into the quantitative data. The research questions were to evaluate (a) students’ learning attitudes, (b) learning satisfactions and (c) learning achievements in order to show the differences of pre-test and post-test between the experimental group and the control group. The experimental results indicate that the experimental group had significant performances than the control group in promoting their learning attitudes, learning satisfactions and learning achievements.