The Effect of Mobile Assisted Language Learning on the Learners' Idiomatic Knowledge

This study investigated the effect of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) on EFL learners‘ idiom learning. To this end, 60 homogenous female learners out of the pool of 85 were selected through Key English Test (KET). Then, the participants were randomly assigned to three groups of 20 learners, two as experimental groups and one as a control group. Learners were studying Top notch, an internationally well-known course book, in Shokuh-e-Ehsan language institute in Urmia, Iran. The researcher prepared an idiom pre-test including 100 idioms from American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms for the learners to write their Persian translations, among which 80 unfamiliar idioms to all the participants were selected for the treatment. During the study, the experimental groups received two kinds of treatment, that is, one of the groups received the form of contextualized MALL in which the idioms were sent to the learners in context and the other one decontextualized MALL in which the idioms with just their meaning were sent to learners‘ mobiles. The teacher sent the idioms to the experimental groups for 20 days (each day 4 idioms). However, the control group received non-mobile-assisted decontextualized instruction of idioms. The results of a paired-samples t-test and one-way ANOVA revealed that the contextualized MALL experimental group performed the best in both immediate and delayed post-tests. The implications are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of MALL in EFL contexts.