Situational awareness and mashups are two key factors influencing the success of situational language teaching. However, traditional situational language teaching cannot smoothly conduct relevant learning activities in changing learning context. This study developed a situational mashups system for detecting users' context and proposed a research model for evaluating users' acceptance on the situational mashups in situational language teaching. The proposed model consisted of users' individual experiences, situational learning theory and technology acceptance theory. The experimental results showed that users' experiences of using computer, Internet, mashups system and mashups-based learning, as well as users' perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of situational mashups are all key factors affecting users' acceptance of situational mashups in situational language teaching.
IntroductionMany studies have focused on improving the instruction paradigm with advanced devices or various learning processes because of the growing educational technology. Situational language teaching (SLT) is an approach developed by British applied linguists from the 1930s to the 1960s (Richards & Rogers, 1986). The instruction paradigm impacts language courses and teaching activities by its continuous use today. The structural view of language is the basis for the oral approach and SLT. Speech as the basis of language and structure is regarded as the heart of speaking ability (SIL International, 1999). The instruction paradigm emphasises presenting language structures in practical situations, implying its distinctness to SLT. Students must understand situations and apply the language and implied meaning to practice-related learning activities, eg, repetition, writing examination, dictation, oral conversation and extended reading. Situation awareness is an advanced concept that assists users to better proceed with daily works and problem solving. Situation description uses series information of participants, activities,
Mashups is an emerging technology on the Web 2.0. Users can propose favorite preferences and compose various widgets in a mashboard. The mashups selection can be performed dynamically identifying the situational set of widgets available at runtime. In this context, there are dynamic changes in user situation, defined as the configuration of accessible widgets depending on user location and schedule. The development of Situational Mashups requires mechanisms to interpret user context and to mash-up widgets. We propose a system including context representation, situation reasoning, workflow planning, and mashups optimization, called SituMash, capable of supporting the automatic composition of widgets in response to situation changes without user manual selection. Experimental results demonstrated that the system possess effective capabilities in compositiontime, ease-of-use and usefulness.
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