Students' attitudes towards a collaborative mobile app in an English for Specific Purposes Course

Abstract

The current study falls within the scope of Mobile Assisted Language Learning technologies (MALL) and aims to analyse students' perceptions and evaluation of a multilingual app, called "Guess It! Language Trainer" designed to facilitate and enhance the learing of foreign languages, more specifically Maritime English (ME). Due to its highly specialized terms, ME terminology and phraseology pose a huge challenge both for foreign language learners and teachers, requiring the design and implementation of specific learning materials. In recent years, there have been encouraging initiatives on part of publishers, researchers and experts to facilitate learners and teachers a range of ME teaching and learning resources, from paper-based learning materials to ICT-based learning environments (MarEng, MarEng Plus). However, still very few attempts have been made in the area of MALL (English@Sea). To address this lack, the authors recently designed the mobile app Guess It!, providing learners with a highly interactive environment which allows them to strengthen their specialized language skills using their smartphones or tablets. Nonetheless, the main objectives of the present study are not the design and working flow of Guess It!, since these have already been analysed in previous works (Perea-Barberá & Berns, 2017; Berns, Palomo-Duarte & Dodero, 2017). Instead, this study focuses on the description of students’ evaluation of the app and the results obtained. The purpose of the evaluation was twofold: on the one hand, the authors aimed to gather ME students’ feedback and perceptions in terms of usability regarding the apps’ interface and, on the other, their opinions with regard to the apps’ impact on their language competencies.