Interactive Mobile Home Tasks vs. Individual Home Tasks in University Foreign Language Education at the Upper-Intermediate Level

Abstract

Homework, being an indispensable part of learning, needs special planning and modification in line with the latest educational development. In this view, we assume that mobile devices can provide ample opportunities for students to interact and collaborate with their group-mates to enhance learning outcomes in university foreign language education. Interactive mobile homework assignments combined with individual ones can noticeably improve these outcomes from different perspectives. They engage students in communicative foreign language usage, encouraging both receptive and productive speech acts, student-to-student cooperation in learning through communication, peer-teaching, and pooling resources which promote the amplification of the learning environment through content and language sharing. On the other hand, interactive mobile homework assignments also have certain risks that may decrease the quality of learning, such as possible error exchange, a superficial approach, a switch to use of native language, and chatting, etc. Nevertheless, interactive mobile homework assignments keep students on the task for a longer period of time because they require each student’s pre-task preparation, longer oral exchanges during the “while phase” and post-task individual summary, therefore providing more practice. The study described in the article highlights the characteristics of the interactive mobile homework tasks, suggests a list of homework task types, both individual and interactive, and compares the results of their practical application in university foreign language education. The authors attempt to identify a trend in their contribution to the learning outcomes achieved by the students while completing their homework, either interactively or individually.

Research on Homework in ELT: A Systematic Review

“…The study also aims to show how aware students of EFL are of contemporary approaches to speaking the language. Similar results were provided by [28], who identified individual and interactive mobile homework as the most important distinguishing factors in speech task performance. Hafour Table 2: Criteria for inclusion and exclusion [29] investigated how asynchronous engagement activities and student-created digital media tasks affect the oral language skills of EFL learners.…”

“…The conclusions of each study were categorized as good, neutral, or negative. Five studies were exclusively classified as positive, indicating that the online homework group outperformed the traditional homework group on all metrics [28], [29], [35], [54]. As measures, the majority of these researches used tests, final grades, or completed homework assignments.…”

“…2-When comparing groups that completed non-interactive digital media assignments (NDMA) and conventional face-to-face assignments (FTFA), the former outperformed the latter only in terms of content and vocabulary; however, it was unable to do so in terms of fluency, pronunciation, grammar, or overall oral language skills. [28] Russia -University students…”

“…Furthermore, three research examined students' attitudes about online assignments [27], [31], [32]. All favored the online method over the traditional homework style [28], [29]. The authors of these studies reached a favorable conclusion on the use of online homework as the chosen method of assignment distribution because their studies revealed disparities in students' communication performance.…”

The Impact of Topic Selection on Lexico-Grammatical Errors and Scores in English Oral Proficiency Interviews of Korean College Students

“…Additionally, examinees could have used avoidance strategies to minimize the occurrence of errors in response to the hypothetical questions [43]. Prompt topic, including task types, can affect ESL learners' behaviors [44] as well as language errors.…”