Teaching english using mobile applications to improve academic performance and language proficiency of college students

The purpose of the study is to determine the effectiveness of mobile applications in conjunction with the students’ online collaboration in the educational environment of Chinese colleges (the context of learning English). The students were selected from all those who study English in their educational programs. At the first stage, they passed a test on the level of language knowledge and among 423 students 140 were selected who had a level of B2 and below. Then they were divided into control and experimental groups. Each had 70 people. The experimental group was trained using the following mobile applications: Busuu, Lingoda, LinguaLeo, BBC Learning English. The results showed that the participants in the experimental group scored higher on the final test (74.71) than the control group participants (65.9). It suggests that mobile learning technologies can improve student achievement. The preliminary test determined the level of knowledge of the experimental group students in this way: 85% of students know English at the B2 level, 14% - B1, and 1% - A2. These figures improved significantly in the second test: the number of students who reached the C2 level was 7%, C1–79%, and 14% of all students remained with the B2 level. For the control group students, these indicators remained unchanged. Most of the students found this format of education suitable and interesting for online collaboration. These results may be useful for teaching practice, because they provide evidence base with the experimental research for the introduction of mobile technologies in the modern educational process. It solves the problem of using the certain mobile applications (Busuu, Lingoda, LinguaLeo, BBC Learning English) that have not been explored before.