Designing a smartphone app to teach English (L2) vocabulary

• The author designed a smartphone app to teach English (L2) vocabulary.
• Experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the app.
• It was a pioneer research of developing a smartphone app to teach English (L2) vocabulary.

The researcher developed a Basic4Android smartphone app (named as Word Learning-CET6) and investigated its effectiveness as a tool in helping English as a Foreign Language college students learn English vocabulary. The app, containing 1274 English words, was designed to be installed into smartphones with Android operating system. To test the program's effectiveness, two groups of students were set up as a test group (those with Word Learning-CET6) and a control group (those without Word Learning-CET6). Knowledge of the vocabulary was tested before and after the study to assess the impact of the program. The study showed that the students using the program significantly outperformed those in the control group in acquiring new vocabulary. At the conclusion of this study, the researcher designed an app and established a pedagogical paradigm which can be followed as a way of mobile learning.