Personalized Intelligent Mobile Learning System for Supporting Effective English Learning

TLDR

English is a global lingua franca, and improving proficiency in non‑English speaking countries is essential for competitiveness, prompting interest in computer‑assisted learning; mobile learning, enabled by wireless technology, offers a flexible, classroom‑independent alternative that inherits e‑learning benefits. The study introduces PIMS, a personalized mobile learning system that recommends English news articles tailored to learners’ reading abilities assessed via fuzzy Item Response Theory. PIMS uses fuzzy Item Response Theory to evaluate reading ability and automatically recommends suitable news articles, while also detecting and retrieving unfamiliar vocabulary to support vocabulary acquisition. Implemented on a PDA, PIMS demonstrated efficient, effective learning by adaptively recommending news articles and improving learners’ vocabulary acquisition, as shown by experimental results.

Abstract

Since English has been an international language, how to enhance English levels of people by useful computer assisted learning forms or tools is a critical issue in non-English speaking countries because it definitely affects the overall competition ability of a country. With the rapid growth of wireless and mobile technologies, the mobile learning has been gradually considered as a novel and effective learning form because it inherits all the advantages of e-learning as well as breaks the limitations of learning time and space occurring in the traditional classroom learning. To provide an effective and flexible learning environment for English learning, this study adopts the advantages of the mobile learning to present a personalized intelligent mobile learning system (PIMS) which can appropriately recommend English news articles to learners based on the learners’ reading abilities evaluated by the proposed fuzzy Item Response Theory (FIRT). In addition, to promote the reading abilities of English news, the unknown or unfamiliar vocabularies of individual learner can also be automatically discovered and retrieved from the reading English news articles by the PIMS system according to the English vocabulary ability of individual learner for enhancing vocabulary learning. Currently, the PIMS system has been successfully implemented on the personal digital assistant (PDA) to provide personalized mobile learning for promoting the reading ability of English news. Experimental results indicated that the proposed system provides an efficient and effective mobile learning mechanism by adaptively recommending English news articles as well as enhancing unknown or unfamiliar vocabularies’ learning for individual learners.