International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

With the development of new technologies, such as Web pages, Apps or social network, the language learning environment seems to be more multiple and interesting. The aim of this paper is to use iPad App in a Taiwanese classroom to help students’ English vocabulary acquisition. During the 18-week lecture, the instructor chose two freshman English classes with a total of 74 students in a private university in Taiwan to be the research subjects. The classes were divided into 2 groups, that is, the experimental group and the control group. In the experimental group, the instructor used iPad “Learn British English WordPower App” to teach English vocabulary while the instructor used the traditional semantic-map method to teach English vocabulary in the control group. The vocabulary teaching lasted about 15 minutes each time, and students under the iPad instruction were able to see the words, word pictures and example sentences through the classroom projector. Besides, class one was asked to fill out the questionnaire to understand students’ attitude toward iPad App teaching in the classroom. The results showed that at the end of the semester, students who received the iPad vocabulary teaching instruction performed better on the post-test. Also, the survey found out that students agreed on using technologies in the classroom can help language learning. That is, using iPad Apps in language teaching can not only enhances students’ learning outcomes, but also increases students’ learning motivation.