A Study Of Senior High School Students’ Mobile-Assisted English Learning In Ethnic Minority Regions

After computers have been integrated into instruction for around half a century,Mobile-Assisted Language Learning(MALL)emerges from the rapid evolution of mobile devices and attracts scholars’ attention home and abroad.However,numerous studies on MALL mainly focus on college students,so this study aims to investigate the status quo of senior high school students’ Mobile-Assisted English Learning(MAEL)in ethnic minority regions.The research questions are: 1)In ethnic minority regions,how do senior high school students use mobile devices to learn English? 2)How do they perceive the usefulness of MAEL? 3)What are their perceptions on the perceived teacher support of MAEL? And 4)Are there any relationships among these students’ using mobile devices in English learning and their perceptions on the usefulness and teacher support of MAEL?Both quantitative and qualitative method were used in this study.With references to Sad & Yakar(2017);Lai & Zheng(2018)and Lai(2015),a questionnaire was adopted to collect quantitative data.The first part of the questionnaire focuses on participants’ background information and their access to mobile devices.The second part of the questionnaire consists of 43 items(items 1-15 on participants’ application of mobile devices to their English learning;items 16-21 on mobile devices’ adverse effect on their English learning process;items 22-37 on their perceptions on the usefulness of MAEL;items 38-43 on their perceptions on their teacher support of MAEL.)A total of 281 students from 2 senior high schools in an autonomous county in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region were involved in the questionnaire.And then statistical software SPSS 22.0 was used to analyze the data from the questionnaire in terms of the descriptive statistics,frequency analysis,one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation analysis.In order to further interpret the quantitative results,6 senior high school students and 3 English teachers were invited to take part in the semi-structured interviews.The major findings are: 1)Almost all the student participants currently own and use at least one mobile device and they believe that mobile devices do not pose a great threat to their English learning.They have positive perceptions toward the usefulness of MAEL.They perceived mobile devices as the most useful tool in supporting personalized English learning.2)Most students prefer to use mobile devices for extensive English audio-visual activities through listening to English songs,watching English videos,TV series,movies and so on,rather than to perform general English learning activities especially via apps or websites due to the limited access to resources on the internet and a lack of technical support.In addition,they seldom engage in English reading,writing and speaking activities through their mobile devices because they hold it is not convenient to do reading and writing tasks on their mobile devices and they admit they have very low competence in English speaking.3)Most students report that their teachers rarely or never provide them with specific suggestions or guidance on using mobile devices to learn English,which indicates a lack of teacher support.4)There is a statistically significant correlations with low coefficients between perceived usefulness,perceived teacher support and the frequency of engaging in MAEL.It is worth mentioning that there is no statistically significant ethnicity difference among senior high school students’ MAEL.It manifests that in China,students with different ethnic background have equal access to learning resources.Although this study is limited in terms of convenient sampling,it is hoped to offer some implications for English teaching and learning in ethnic minority regions and suggestions for future study.