Meeting 24/11/20: Language learning in mobile apps

Hello PEGasus team!

We had our last first meeting of 2020-2021 today and what a way to start this term. We had Simon Jonsson talking about his Ph.D. research on language learning in mobile apps. Simon earned a BSc Psychology, an MSc Statistics, and an MSc Web Science, and is now at the final stages of his Ph.D. at the University of Southampton.

In this session, Simon talked about the Spanish app he created- https://lengua.app/, his research aim – how to design apps to be both educational and engaging? and how it was inspired by his interests in developing his Spanish linguistic skills.

The flow experience (see Csíkszentmihályi, 1990 and 2008) played a key role in his theoretical framework and he focused on how it could be applicable to education technology in a way that is beyond the gamification used by other mobile language apps.

In his flow experiment, he investigated the effect of immediate feedback on Flow to ensure sufficient usability of the app. He carried out an initial participant laboratory experiment with 30 participants to test the following two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Immediate feedback elicits higher levels of Flow compared to delayed feedback.
Hypothesis 2: The app has an acceptable level of usability.

Participants completed two 10-minute study sessions: one with immediate feedback and one with delayed feedback. After each session, they filled out the Flow Short Scale.

His preliminary results showed that the fluency component of Flow Short Scale was significantly higher in the immediate feedback condition, the overall Flow component of Flow Scort Scale was marginally significant (p=0.054), and the usability was 79.3, which is above the “acceptable” threshold of 70. Hypothesis 2 was fully supported and Hypothesis 1 partially supported. This implies that the timing of Flow may be a fruitful research area, the immediate feedback is promising for inducing Flow, and the overall design of the app is Flow inducing.

The next step now is to get the word out on https://lengua.app/ so we can get Simon as many downloads and mobile language learners as possible.

Thank you to Simon and the PGRs who joined us today. See you back in January!

References

Csikszentmihalyi M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row.

Csíkszentmihályi, M. (2008). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *