2014 IEEE 14th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Mobile-Based AR Application Helps to Promote EFL Children’s Vocabulary Study
Junjie He 1, Jiali Ren 1, Gaoxia Zhu1,2, Su Cai 1,3, Guang Chen1,3
1
School of Educational Technology, Faculty of Education
2
Joint Laboratory for Mobile Learning, Ministry of Education-China Mobile Communications Corporation
3
Collaborative & Innovative Center for Educational Technology (CICET)
Beijing Normal University
Beijing, China
caisu@bnu.edu.cn
Abstract—The advancement of mobile device is influencing the
learning activities markedly. In this study, we attempt to use
augmented reality (AR) technology to design and develop
mobile-based English learning software for pre-school children
in order to solve the problem of bored students and teachers’
non-standard pronunciation; the mobile learning system is
able to present the learning materials including virtual
pictures, the meaning and pronunciation of words. A vivid
picture will emerge when using mobile camera to identify an
English word on card, which improves children’s interests in
learning. The 40 pre-school children who participated in this
research were assigned to an experimental and a control
group. From the pre-tests and post-tests as well as the
interview of the English teacher, it was found that the students
learning with mobile-based AR software had greater learning
achievement than control group ones. Thus the teacher hold
positive attitude to this software.
Keywords-augmented reality; mobile platform; pre-school
children; EFL(English as a foreign language)
I. INTRODUCTION
The English education of pre-school children has
attracted more and more attention gradually in some non-
native English speaking countries. In China, ELF (English as
a Foreign Language) learners often have a number of
problems when learning vocabulary, e.g. lacking of scenario
creation, old teaching model and teachers’ poor
pronunciation[1]. In addition, some teachers seldom pay
attention to train or motivate children’s abilities. As for
traditional methods of teaching English, the interaction
between teachers and students is usually by gestures and
discussions, yet short of interesting interaction[2]. Therefore,
without enough interests for text words, it is easy to make
English teaching into trouble. Whereas, some interactive
learning software are changing the traditional way.
In recent years, there have been appeared more and more
researches on augmented reality(AR). Augmented Reality
(AR) was defined as a variation of Virtual Environments
(VE), which allows the user to see the real world, with
virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the
real world in 1997[3]. AR can be used to bring virtual
elements into real world, providing a pleasant, natural and
interactive atmosphere which combines virtual and real
environment. In the field of education, compared to
traditional learning environment, AR-based learning
978-1-4799-4038-7/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE 431
DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2014.129
environment can improve learners’ hands-on ability and
promote their motivation. [4]
At the same time, mobile technology has become
essential in daily life, learners are no longer constrained by
time and location. Since mobile device is small, smart,
portable and comfortable to use, it has become a main way
for learning. Especially, mobile learning resource as a
supplement of existing learning resource, it is vital to
develop and improve its advantages. Some researchers have
investigated the practice of English mobile learning which
combines AR technology and mobile learning [5]. AR-based
mobile learning material has been popularized. [6].
However, only a few researches are conducted by
combing AR and mobile learning. Further, most software
lacking interactivity leads to poor learning effects. English
vocabulary needs a vivid learning environment for pre-
school children. In this study, we attempt to use AR
technology combined with mobile device to design and
develop English learning software for pre-school children.
The mobile learning system is able to present the learning
materials including virtual pictures, the meaning of words,
and pronunciation of words by using mobile camera to
identify English word card, which supposes to improve
children’s learning interests.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II introduces the participants, research setup,
measuring tools and development of our mobile AR
application. Section III analyzes the learning achievement
and the teacher’s attitude to the mobile-based AR experiment.
Section IV is the conclusion and discussion. Finally, the
limitation of our experiment is given in Section V.
II. METHOD
This study aims to investigate the changes in students’
learning interest, after using the mobile application that we
developed. A famous saying tells, “Interest is the best
teacher”. We finally came to this result after the study.
A. Participants
The participants were two classes of pre-school children.
Their ages ranged from four to six. There were 20 children in
each class .One was assigned to be the experimental group
named A, while the other was the control group named B.
None of them had experience in mobile devices and these
words were never taught before.
 B. Research setup
The learning activity was carried out in a kindergarten
located in Beijing City. The learning content was to ask the
students to learn eight new English words and corresponding
animals. That was, we expected the students to memorize
these words preliminary after this learning activity. Figure 1
shows the research design of this study.
Figure 1. Research Framework.
As was mentioned above, the students are divided into
two groups, each of which was divided into 5 smaller ones(4
students each). Students in each group were given the same
pre-test, to acquaintance the prior knowledge level of the
students. After teaching, all were given another same sheet
as post-test. All the test sheets were numbered to make sure
the same person’s study results were compared, and to avoid
disorder.
The most significant difference between the two groups
was whether the students memorize the words by teacher
(“human guide learning”, or “traditional learning”) or by the
mobile application (“mobile learning”).
For Group A, the students learn via mobile application
with the help of the assistants. There was no traditional
teaching methods. The students met the new words, fetched
them through mobile camera, memorized the corresponding
pictures and followed the pronunciations of the words. As
for Group B, there was a human teacher teaching. The
assistants handed out word cards and corresponding pictures
to the students. The students repeated and memorized both
the word and the picture after the teacher pronouncing the
words. Research process of both groups was similar: pre-test,
learning words and post-test at last. Finally, researchers
compared the quantity of right answers in the post-test with
the pre-test of the same person. Students in the experimental
group making greater progress than in the control group, we
can conclude that, mobile learning shows bigger advantage.
C. Measuring tools
On the pre-test sheet given to each student, there was a
match game about the 8 words. Column A was 8 English
words of the animals, Column B was the corresponding
pictures. The students needed to link the words from Column
A to the correspondences from Column B. The post-test
shared the same question with the pre-test.
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D. Development of mobile AR application
A mobile learning application used to arouse interest in
learning English has been developed with AR (Augmented
Reality) technology, as shown in Figure 2. This system was
implemented with Java 1.7, Android SDK and Wikitude
SDK. The functions of the application include fetching and
recognizing words, showing the corresponding picture and
pronunciation.
Figure 2. Framework of the mobile AR application.
Figure 3 shows the users’ interface of the mobile AR
application. The top one is the welcome page, including
three buttons – “Fetching Words”, “About the Developers”
and “Exit”. Clicking “Fetching Words” button to enter the
“the word-fetching page” of the application. Aiming at the
words on card with the mobile camera, it will show the
clickable corresponding picture. The application will
pronounce the word after being clicked. The learners need to
fetch the word, connect it with the appearing picture, click it,
listen to the pronunciation, repeat, and finally memorize
them.
Figure 3. Users’ interface
III. RESULT
This study investigates the learning achievement of
students as well as teacher’s attitude after participating in the
mobile-based AR learning activity. The “learning
achievement test” are used to students before and after the
experiment. As there is some difficulty in testing the attitude
of the kindergarten children, we interviewed the English
teacher of the class who participated in our experiment in the
end.
A. Analysis of learning achievement
To explore whether mobile-based AR learning activity is
helpful, an independent test was used to analyze the pre and
post-test scores of the two groups. The means and standard meets the cognitive rules of children. However, mobile
deviations in pre-tests and post-tests of the learning phones may distract students’ attention. This type of teaching
evaluation for both the experimental and control groups are is more suitable for one-to-one tuition. Also, the amount of
presented in TABLE I, from which we can find that the vocabulary is a little large for kids of this age. Creating the
students in Group A have made remarkable progress, for overall learning environment in the beginning, it will be
their mean score changes from 23.125 to 73.125. As shown better.”
in TABLE II, no significant difference (p=.930) is found in
the pre-test of the experimental and control group, but an IV. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
extremely significant difference (p=.000<.001) appeared in The best period of children’s language acquisition is 0 to
the post-test between the two groups. We can conclude that 9[7]. The software and learning method are interesting,
mobile-based AR learning software is helpful to students combining words with animals and pronunciations. The
who are non-native speakers for learning vocabularies. mobile phone is easy to carry, so students can study words
whenever and wherever they want. There is extremely
significant difference between the post-test of the two
groups, this suggests that mobile-based AR learning is much
better than cards instruction in the study of vocabulary for
EFL children. At the same time, the influence of mobile
  phones on children’s attention, eyesight, health and etc.
Figure 4. The experimental students are studying words using the mobile- should be considered. This needs further research.
based AR application.
V. LIMITATION
Even though the result reveals that children benefit a lot
TABLE I. STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN THE EXPERIMENTAL AND
CONTROL GROUP and expressed keen interests in the learning process, there is
still some limitation. The teaching and learning process in
Assessment Group N Mean SD Std. Error Mean both groups began at the same time. The teaching assistants
control 20 23.750 22.544 5.041 in the two groups are not the same. We choose 8 words about
Pre-test
experimental 20 23.125 21.943 4.907 animals for those kids and test them before and after learning.
control 20 26.250 21.422 4.790 The task may be a little heavy for those kids, because they
Post-test
experimental 20 73.125 35.419 7.920
show positive attitude to the learning process but less interest
TABLE II. T-TEST FOR EQUALITY OF MEANS
to the pre-test and post-test.

Sig. (2- Mean Std. Error

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Assessment t Df
tailed) Difference Difference Our work is supported by the Fundamental Research
Pre-test .089 38 .930 .625 7.035 Funds for the Central Universities (2012LYB14) and Beijing
Post-test -5.064 31.259 .000 -46.875 9.256 Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project (YETP0230).

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