| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 教育研究所 === 105 === This study integrates characteristics of mobile learning with concepts of peer assessment to design a mobile English writing system named “XiaPin Writer.” The system includes sentence patterns commonly used in English textbooks following the standards of high school English curriculum to encourage students to practice making English sentences in real life contexts. To conduct the needs analysis, the author reviewed relevant literature and analyzed existing applications about English learning, and interview teachers and students and, finally, the author developed the system prototype based on results of the needs analysis.
The evaluation of the system prototype includes expert evaluation and a user test. In the expert-evaluation stage, four experts provided suggestions regarding interface consistency, information clarity, convenience of use, and so on. In the user-test stage, to compare the learning effectiveness of students with different learning approaches, a four-week experiment was conducted in a senior high school English course. Three classes of students were assigned to a control group and two experiment groups. The students in the control group practiced making sentences in the traditional homework style; the students in the experimental group1 practice making sentences with the App and commented on peers’ sentences via the App; and the students in the experimental group2 also practiced making sentences with the App and received feedback from the English teacher and peers. The participants who used the App to practice English writing would fill out the QUIS questionnaires, and four students participated in the semi-structured interview to express their attitudes toward the App.
The result indicated that the experimental groups1 outperformed both the control group and the experimental group2 in the English grammar errors, Chinglish, and accuracy. The experimental group2 outperformed the control group in the sentence numbers but the three groups showed no difference in syntactic complexity. The system usability results show that the system interface and functional operations are simple and clear, and that the system motivates the students to practice sentence-making because the students thought the photos and sentences are interesting and served as common topics of communication. Yet, the integration and playfulness of the system can be further improved.
Regarding future research, providing users with various learning tasks such as making daily sentences and writing exercises guided by certain structures or applying game elements such as scoring and giving rewards to the system design could enhance the fun of the system. Additionally, how students comment on peers’ English writing via the system combining with different teaching methods affect students’ writing performance could be also investigated.
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