Evaluation of English vocabulary mobile apps to help Malaysian secondary school students

Abstract

Since the teaching of English vocabulary items is not heavily emphasized inschoolsanymore, Malaysian secondary school students need other sources to learn English vocabulary. In today’s context, where many Malaysian secondary school students own smartphones, lessons provided by English vocabulary apps could be a perfect solution to the problem. However, as there are way too many vocabulary apps available for download in the market, there needs to be a way to identify the right apps that students should use based on several important factors such as their CEFR levels, usability, fun factor, and effectiveness. In order to separate the wheat from the chaffand find high quality apps out of the thousands of mediocre vocabulary apps available on the market, we adapted a comprehensive educational app evaluation rubric to be used in our search. From our findings, we recommend five English vocabulary apps which could be effectively used by Malaysian secondary school students in order to broaden their knowledge of English vocabulary