Learning a new language is a challenging task. In many countries, students are encouraged to learn an international language at school level. In particular, English is the most widely used international language and is being taught at the school level in many countries. The ubiquity and accessibility of smartphones combined with the recent developments in mobile application and gamification in teaching and training have paved the way for experimenting with language learning using mobile phones. This article presents a systematic literature review of the published research work in mobile-assisted language learning. To this end, more than 60 relevant primary studies which have been published in well-reputed venues have been selected for further analysis. The detailed analysis reveals that researchers developed many different simple and gamified mobile applications for learning languages based on various theories, frameworks, and advanced tools. Furthermore, the study also analyses how different applications have been evaluated and tested at different educational levels using different experimental settings while incorporating a variety of evaluation measures. Lastly, a taxonomy has been proposed for the research work in mobile-assisted language learning, which is followed by promising future research challenges in this domain.
This study is a part of my doctoral thesis work at the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisors, Prof. Dr. Nor Azan Mat Zin, Dr. Fadhilah Rosdi, and Prof. Dr. Adnan Abid. I also wish to express my sincere thanks to all the co-authors who have contributed to this work.
Kashif Ishaq conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, performed the computation work, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, and approved the final draft.
This work was supported by the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia under the Grand Challenge Fund (Grant number DCP-2017-007/2). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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