Mobile phone motivates language learners
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A combination of a book and a mobile phone, used as experimental language teaching material, has produced encouraging results. The ”hybrid book” was tested in a school in Hämeenlinna.
”It gave us nice variety and new motivation”, says Iida-Lotta Mattila, a pupil in grade 6-B at Hämeenlinnan Yhteiskoulu. She tested the new method of learning English for three weeks.
A mobile phone equipped with an image recognition application developed by the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) was used to complement an ordinary English textbook.
The mobile phone was used to take pictures of a spread of the book, whereupon the application opened an internet page containing the related exercises.
The tasks could be either listening comprehension exercises, multiple choice exercises, or crosswords with sound clues.
Mattila regards the multiple choice exercises and crosswords as the most interesting ones, in other words she thought that they were different enough from ordinary exercises.
According to VTT, the combination of a mobile phone and a textbook is an intermediate stage in the development of learning materials.
The experiment also showed that the pupils learned very quickly how to use a new mobile phone model.
The teacher did not need to fear that the lesson would be ruined because of a technical failure, as it would also have been possible to use the book alone.
English teacher Pirjo Pelto, who has made textbooks herself, was so inspired by the new method that she invented some additional things, for example a play on video. Moreover, she used text messaging to give her pupils translation exercises.
”It was interesting to observe when the pupils did their exercises. Some did them already at school, while some others did them at home at 9 o’clock in the evening. Some pupils did the exercises in the morning just before the lesson”, Pelto notes.
”But who will pay? Not all schools have even computers?” Pelto responds to the question of whether mobile phones could be used more for teaching purposes. After all, all young people know well enough how to use mobile phones.
Learning by Hybrid Media is a two-year project which will come to an end next spring.
The project is being financed by the major Finnish forest companies, including M-Real, Myllykoski, Stora Enso, and UPM, as well as by the Finnsh Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES).
Even the Helsinki University of Technology, the University of Tampere, and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology are involved in the project.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 4.12.2009 - TODAY |
 Mobile phone motivates language learners |
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