Technology in TESOL: Smart Phones

I am not ashamed to admit that I enjoy Star Trek. If you are like me, you may have noticed that our world today is beginning to resemble life on the Enterprise, Voyager or Deep Space 9.

We are already able to search the Internet with pictures taken with our smart phones. It is only a matter of time before our phones will scan us for illness, or even be set to stun.

If your ESL students are like mine, they use their phones during English class to translate and text their friends. However, I was sure there were more useful functions the phone could serve. After a bit of research, I discovered I was right. Here is one application I thought was interesting.

The whole idea for this app is that learning is best done in context. Since many phones have location settings now, i.e. they are following your every move, the phone is able to recognize where the user is and begin to supply them with vocabulary for their surroundings.  For example, if my phone knows I am at a hair salon, then it might display the words “shampoo” and “hot rollers.” I can review the English words like flashcards while the stylist makes me beautiful.

The app sorts the words using the Leitner System, whereby unknown words appear regularly, decreasing in frequency of appearance the more often the user chooses the correct meaning or translation.

Does an app like this work in the classroom? Not really. So now let’s try to think of ways to integrate smart phones into our lessons.

• One obvious suggestion is to have ESL students research grammar or content with their web browser.
• A second idea might be have students send each other text messages during class. With permission, create a phone list with all the numbers of the other students. Then run an information gap activity where students exchange information using text messaging.
• Perhaps students can use their camera to take a picture of a classmate or an object in the school, attach the picture to an email, and send that email to a friend or family member with a description.

If you have ever tried incorporating smart phones into your lessons, I would be interested to hear about what you did and how well it worked.