Abstract:

One of the problems of beginner english learners while reading or trying to express their opinion is pronunciation. Without a correct pronunciation, non-english speaking students may struggle to communicate appropriately and pronounce words or sentences incorrectly. Traditional english courses try to approach this issue through books, illustration of phonetics or audible recordings. Books usually illustrate the stress and intonation of a sentence to improve pronunciation. However, this traditional approach lacks interaction and motivational aspects to students which at the end produces that some of the students lose interest in pronunciation learning. Therefore, we develop an immersive mobile app called AR-Tracks. The mobile app is based on augmented reality technology which introduces a dynamic and interesting way of learning with 3D learning content, phonetics narrations, audible reading scripts and word-by-word pronunciation. The aim of this study is to provide how innovative technologies such as Augmented reality can produce meaningful improvements of english pronunciation through interaction and motivation.

The Augmented Reality app was developed with Unity and Vuforia frameworks. For this process the research follows a 3-step methodology. Content preparation, development of augmented reality activities and testing. During the testing process, the evaluation of the augmented reality app was conducted with beginner english students in three different classrooms at the University of Guayaquil in Ecuador. Results show positive acceptance by students. Additionally, the learning results have significantly improved thanks to the increased engagement and interactivity provided by the augmented reality application.

Keywords:

Augmented Reality, Vuforia, Technology, English, Education, EFL, ICT, Pronunciation, IT, Phonetics.