Effects of Mobile Drama With Authentic Contexts on English Learning

Teaching English in a classroom setting where EFL learners were usually sitting at desks and doing English learning tasks using paper and pencil is inefficient. It has considerable potential problems that could lead to students learning in a passive state. More specifically, the teaching materials are inconsistent with students' authentic experiences, which decreases the learning efficiency, learning motivation, and levels of interactivity. An annotatable multimedia E-reader (AME) was developed to address these problems. The provided various annotation tools to help students create dramas with authentic contexts. The study participants were 48 junior high school students and divided into the experimental group (EG) and control group (CG). Results revealed that learning English through drama with AME assistance in authentic contexts significantly improved the participants' learning achievements. In other words, the learning achievements of the EG were superior to those of the CG. Moreover, the results indicated that different learning behaviors were significantly related to different learning achievements. Thus, the greater the diversity of learning behaviors practiced by the students in the drama activity in authentic contexts, the higher the students' learning scores on different dimensions. Finally, the results indicated that using the AME in authentic contexts was beneficial for English learning through drama.