Design of a M-Learning System for Enhancing English Speaking Proficiency in University Students

Abstract

"English is one of the languages spoken by most people worldwide, making it recognized as a language of international communications. Although Sinhala is the primary language of Sri Lanka, fluency in English is equally valued, particularly for those starting in the workforce. English proficiency greatly increases employment opportunities in almost every employment field. University students can be identified as a significant portion of the population, whose next move is to begin working in the sector. For them, knowing English fluently is therefore a must. Hence this research was carried out to design and implement a mobile learning system to improve the English-speaking proficiency of university students since communication skills are more crucial for an employee. This m-learning system has two main parts which are the mobile application which is capable of running on both Android and iOS mobile devices and the recommendation algorithm which is implemented to recommend learning activities to the user. The activities are suggested to that particular user according to the user’s preferred learning style based on the VARK model. This recommendation algorithm is a collaborative filtering algorithm and data which is needed for the algorithm were collected through a survey among the university students of Sri Lanka. As the initial results, the model was capable of recommending 5 activities to the user from the total activities when a user initially selects an activity based on his preference. This is done as per the ratings test users gave for each activity during the survey, by calculating the similarities of ratings. The model obtained a Mean Square Error of 0.25 during the process."