Teaching through Educational Apps: The Effect of Using Smart Books on Enriching the Oral Communicative Ability of the Learners

Abstract

The appropriate use of new technologies and educational applications is undoubtedly very important in facilitating English language learners’ communicative competence. One of these technological devices used in education is the smartbook. Accordingly, the present study has tried to investigate the effectiveness of the use of smartbooks in the process of teaching English to learners and, consequently, the improvement of their communicative ability. In order to collect data for the study, 40 high school students learning English, including one experimental group and one control group, participated in this study. A pre-post test and teacher-made tests were designed for the learners. The One-way ANCOVA results indicated that the learners participating in the experimental group were more successful than those participating in the control group. This shows that the use of smartbooks has a significant effect on improving the oral communicative ability of English language learners. Implications for L2 researchers and practitioners were finally discussed.

Keywords

• communicative competence
• educational application
• smartbook
• technology-mediated language teaching
• virtual education