Mobile Phone Based Activities for Learning Proverbs among Iranian EFL Learners (Examining the Effect of Telegram)

Technology usage as one of the learning tools has been recently considered enhancing second language acquisition. Today, educators are interested in using education with electronic learning instruments and by improving mobile cell phone to Smartphone and creating them based on internet based platforms; many messenger applications appeared to connect millions of users around the world to each other. To check the effect of Telegram as one of the most popular chat applications on proverb learning, a sample of Oxford Placement Test (Allan, 2004) was administered to a group of 54 EFL learners and then 36 learners at the pre-intermediate level were selected as the participants of the study. A pre-test to decide proverb knowledge of learners and all target proverbs for teaching were chosen from 101 American English Proverbs by Collis (2009). The participants who had internet access and Telegram application on their mobile phones were grouped as an experimental group and been asked to make Telegram channel for sharing data during the treatment period. The other participants without any access to this application on their phones were grouped as a control group and studied the same learning materials in a paper-based format. Afterwards, a post-test based on the taught proverbs were taken to find out the results of the study. An Independent Sample t-test was performed to compare the results of post-test between two groups and indicated the subjects who used their phones to learn proverbs outperformed the others didn’t use and it concluded teaching second language components should be well-adjusted to the improvement of technology equipment for releasing encountered barriers of education.