The Implementation of Educational Texting as an Instructional Facilitator in the Iranian EFL Context

Abstract

Using mobile phones in the learning process is cost-effective; and concurrently, it allows the education to extend to all places; and students, especially those living in very distant, poor, or less equipped areas, can take advantage of it for learning. Some research studies show that mobile phones can have more positive rather than negative feedback on learners (Beland & Murphy, 2016; Brion, 2019; Crompton & Burke, 2015; Fabian et al., 2018; Gürkan, 2018; Pollara & Broussard, 2011). Mobile learning (m-learning) is mostly considered as a kind of learning method in which mobile platforms are used in learning process. It combines all the qualities related to computer network technology, mobile communications technology, multimedia technology, and modern education (Rezaei et al., 2014). Talking about the mobile phone, the first idea that may come to the reader's mind is a smartphone that can be connected to high speed Internet connection, which provides a cyber-learning environment for the students to learn and for the teacher to teach their material. Still, it is not the case in all the educational contexts. As mentioned earlier, some unseen factors may limit the functions of the smartphone in education. The other issue, which was mentioned earlier, is the network connection and then the speed of the Internet. Education is not for a group of people with average or high economic levels of wealth, but it belongs to all the students from big cities to very distant and remote villages. In this case, although there is no Internet coverage in all the areas, mobile network coverage is still fair, so using a mobile phone without online applications can be considered functional. To overcome all these problems and get closer to the purpose of this study, Short Message Service (SMS) was used as an instrument to deliver the content for the current study. According to Jambulingam (2013), SMS has the feature of affordability, which motivates the users to employ it more than any other applications. Yengin et al. (2010) stated that rather than implementing the learning labs and various educational applications, SMS deployment enables the officials to send a message to plenty of students. SMS is considered as being a two-way communication tool from teachers to students, students to students, and students to teacher, and it can be sent from either a mobile phone to mobile phone, mobile phone to a computer, and computer to a mobile phone. The SMS is a type of educational tool that is user-friendly, cost-effective, and has a high-speed delivery. Using SMS in education can be considered a support, which helps to learn free from the time and location limitation (Kinshunk, 2003). The SMS as a learning medium can be implemented in two different learning models. The first one is a push model (Yengin, 2011) in which the teacher is the decision-maker regarding the content and time of the message, and students cannot reply back to the message. In this model, communication is a one-way method, and it included the motivational and preparatory parts of a lesson plan. On the contrary, the pull model will allow the students to follow a two-way communication system, in which they can send and receive the reply and feedback. According to TxtTools (2011), other activities such as fill in the blank, true & false, and multiple-choices are also applicable in education through SMS. Considering the aforementioned advantages of m-learning in education, problems dealing with online applications and the presence of great opportunities through sending SMSs, this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of implementing instructional SMSs in the EFL learning environment, to compute the vocabulary depth and breadth of students via SMS, to achieve the percentage of learning autonomy among students who received the SMS as a treatment and to elicit learners' perceptions regarding the use of SMS and mobile learning in EFL contexts. Unlike the existing literature, this study aims at measuring the relationship between vocabulary learning through the mobile phone and the ability to understand the reading texts at the pre-intermediate level. Thus, it can be stated that this research is a comprehensive study, which measures the academic performance of students as well as their existing cognitive level. Method Participants After conducting an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) to homogenize the groups, 74 participants were selected as the final population of the study. In order to carry out the three research studies for the current doctoral investigation, students were divided into two groups: a control and an experimental group, with equal division of 37 participants in each. Out of the entire pool of participants, around 65% (N=48) were females and 35% (N=26) were males. Instruments In this study, the following instruments were used to collect the required data: Oxford Placement Test (OPT) An Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered in order to measure participants' overall ability to communicate in English. This test includes 60 items divided into two parts: part one focuses on grammar and the second part focuses on reading and vocabulary. Preliminary English Test (PET) In order to assess participants’ prior knowledge in reading comprehension, the reading part of the Preliminary English Test (PET) was administered as the pretest before starting the treatment process, and at the end of the study to assess the effectiveness of the treatment and learners’ achievement. The test consists of 35 items and it includes 5 parts. General English Book Due to the internal policy of the institution where the study was conducted, the General English Book: A task-based approach written by Daftarifard and Bagherpour (2018) had to be used as the course book for this reading comprehension course. The participants of the study including the control group and the experimental one had access to this book; however, the experimental group received short messages which included parts the vocabulary present in the course book. This book contains nine lessons with color photos and tables and the focus is on reading comprehension. Only the first five lessons were taught during this semester. Each lesson covers different types of reading strategies such as guessing, scanning, skimming, reading a table, summarizing a text, etc. Educational Short Message System 108 words were sent in total during six weeks of treatment. The sent vocabulary items and examples were as short as possible so that the students could easily read the messages on their small screens. Only 6 words were sent per message. The vocabulary items were presented by their Persian definition and sample sentences. The delivery reports of the mobile phones were controlled in order to remove the possible failure of the system. Autonomy Questionnaire. The updated vocabulary level test (UVLT) was the other instrument of this study to assess learners' vocabulary size/breadth. The UVLT is probably the commonly used instrument to assess L2 learners' word knowledge (Read, 2000). It was initially made by Nation (1983) and later modified by Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham (2001) to identify how well learners know useful English words and the extent to which learners could distinguish the form-meaning relations of words at four levels of word frequency (2000, 3000, 5000, 10000) and an academic vocabulary level. Findings The first study aimed to check whether there were any significant vocabulary gains through the use of the educational SMSs in an EFL learning context. Additionally, it sought to measure the effectiveness of this type of vocabulary learning strategy on 74 Iranian EFL learner’s reading comprehension ability of pre-intermediate texts. The study was a quantitative study and the data that were gathered through the implementation of a pre-post-test were analyzed with the SPSS software. The results of the study revealed better performance in reading comprehension within the experimental group; however, the statistics were not significant, so it can be concluded that learning vocabulary through SMSs did not have any sign of significant effects on the reading ability of Iranian EFL learners. The second study measured the level of Iranian EFL learner`s autonomy after being exposed to the treatment, which was vocabulary learning through educational SMSs, and it elicited the perceptions of learners regarding the implementation of mobile learning in educational contexts. 37 students formed the experimental group who were interviewed by the researcher after the experiment (a semi-structured interview). Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected for this study. It was revealed that gender is not a practical variable in the determination of the autonomy level. The perceptions of the Iranian EFL learners were investigated towards MALL, and they have stated that implementing the mobile phone in the learning and teaching contexts can provide better, exciting, incentive, diverse and practical experience during the process. The third study measured the vocabulary breadth or size of words and the vocabulary depth or knowledge of words among 37 Iranian EFL learners in the experimental group who received 106 words through educational SMSs by means of using a mobile phone. The results of the study showed that the performance of the Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary depth in both the pre-test and the post-test were the same, therefore, it can be concluded that using the SMS as an instructional tool to implement vocabulary items does not have any significant effect on learners’ vocabulary knowledge. On the contrary, it was proven that the vocabulary size of the same students had a significant difference in the post-test, which leads to the conclusion that using the SMS to teach vocabulary will positively increase the vocabulary size of the Iranian EFL learners.