Second Language Vocabulary Learning While Walking

Abstract

Second language (L2) learners often lack opportunities or motivation to dedicate their time to vocabulary learning over other daily activities. In this work, we introduce a mobile application that allows L2 learners to instead leverage their "dead time", such as when walking to and from school or work, to study new vocabulary items. The application combines audio learning and location-based contextually relevant L1-L2 word pairs to allow L2 learners to "discover" new foreign language words while walking. We report on the evaluation of the approach from three aspects: L2 vocabulary retention after 1 month, system usability and workload.