Exploring Perspectives of Students on Using Mobile Apps to Improve English Vocabulary Through Youtube Videos: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Currently, in countries where the mother tongue is not English language, globalization brings a very important requirement related with level of English since it facilitates communication in any area, be it, business, education, tourism, and so on. People need to have a good mastery of the English language, however, if the mother tongue is different from English, dominating the English language can become a very serious problem. Under these circumstances, in countries where the mother tongue is not English, educational institutions have included meaningful learning of English as a second language in their curriculum for many years. Vocabulary is one of the essential components of any language and it is required get a good level in order to have success in the process of teaching/learning of the English. Spaced repetition has been widely implemented and examined in mobile-assisted vocabulary learning as an important learning strategy. In this context, the purpose of this comparative study was to investigate and compare university students’ perspectives utilizing two mobile apps to improve English vocabulary in the Language Department at University of Cuenca (Ecuador): the first application is Slango and the second was chosen applying multi-criteria decision making of a set of mobile apps with similar features than Slango. Therefore, we did a comparative evaluation of the two mobile apps in order to evaluate usability by using SUS questionnaire and desirability by using Microsoft Desirability Test. Results show that Slango has similar features as ReadLang (the second app to compare) when it is used to improve student English vocabulary using YouTube videos.