Mobile learning in English language learning at Higher Education: a systematic review
Abstract
Learning English as a foreign language is crucial to cope in a globalized society. Moreover, technological advances along with the integration of ICT into education in the last decades have enhanced the teaching-learning process thanks to the emergence of new tools and modes of teaching, such as mobile learning.
To ascertain whether mobile learning benefits the process of learning English as a foreign language, a systematic review of qualitative design was conducted. During the research process, 38 articles that met the eligibility criteria were retrieved and thus, they were classified depending on their object of study. This paper concludes that mobile learning fosters the development of the communicative competences (oral comprehension, oral production, written comprehension and written production) to learn English as a foreign language at Higher Education. Similarly, positive results have also been noted regarding the linguistic competences of vocabulary and pronunciation to learn English at Higher Education. Nevertheless, greater disparity of results is found in relation to grammar learning. Finally, a change of research tendency is noted in the last two decades regarding English learning through m-learning given that oral production has gone from being the third most studied communicative competence to be the most analysed, followed by vocabulary learning.
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