The impact of using a mobile app on improving students’ creative thinking in business English writing with self-regulated learning

Abstract

Creative thinking skills play an important role in Business English writing, but university students are not creative enough due to the overemphasis of knowledge input in traditional Business English writing classroom in mainland China. To solve this problem, this study involves in the mobile learning environment as the medium. By encouraging students to practice various self-regulated learning strategies while studying the learning content designed by referring to Zimmerman’s self-regulated learning model and Wen’s Production-Oriented Approach via the mobile App Superstar, this study aims to promote students’ creative thinking skills in Business English writing. Students reported increased self-regulated learning ability after the experiment. It is found that there is a significant positive relationship between online self-regulated learning and creative thinking and students’ creative thinking skills are significantly improved in post-test in Business English writing. Among all the nine self-regulated writing strategies, goal-oriented monitoring and evaluation, idea planning, and emotional control are the most important predictors of students’ creative thinking levels.