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2025-12
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Applied Linguistics
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Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging immersive technology capable of overlaying digital content onto a user’s present experience of reality with the use of a digital device such as a smartphone or tablet. AR offers novel and engaging possibilities for applied pedagogy in the field of SLA. At present, few researchers have examined the effectiveness of AR in the deliberate study of L2 vocabulary and how it compares to existing empirically researched methods of vocabulary study. This novelty presents many gaps for the research of AR as applied to vocabulary study. The problems examined in this study were (a) how the physical environment aids in leveraging vocabulary acquisition via AR, (b) the differences in the ease of retention and recall of concrete nouns as compared to action verbs, and (c) differences in the psychological state of consciousness known as flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) as experienced by participants studying vocabulary with AR as compared to physical word cards.
This study had three purposes: (a) To understand how a contextually situated tablet-based AR study method compares with an analog word card study method in the deliberate study of nonwords, (b) to understand if concrete nouns are more easily learned and retained as compared to action verbs within both juxtaposed methods of treatment, and (c) to understand if the AR treatment method facilitates states of flow in participants more readily as compared to a word card treatment. Forty-eight L1 Japanese-speaking first- through fourth-year university students, who were selected randomly from a pool of 70 interested participants from two university sites in Tokyo, studied four sets of nonword forms and their assigned Japanese meanings. Two of these sets were comprised of concrete nouns and two sets were comprised of action verbs. Nonword word length, phonetic and orthographic legality, and their corresponding L1 meaning frequency were controlled for. The participants studied the target word sets using either tablet-based AR or analog word cards, as assigned in a counterbalanced design. Participants’ flow states were measured using the Japanese Flow State Scale (JFSS) after each treatment session, for a total of four measurements per participant. Immediate and delayed posttests, comprised of written receptive meaning-recall test items, were administered to measure the creation of a form-meaning link in the experimental treatments. The collected posttest data were subjected to a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) to compare the effect of the two study methods, as well as the part of speech, on the retention of the form-meaning links of the vocabulary studied. The instruments used in this study were assessed by fitting their data to the Rasch model. The data collected with the JFSS were subjected to a Rasch analysis. The Rasch person-ability measures, per person and per study method, were subjected to a two-factorial repeated-measures ANOVA to compare the influence of the two study methods (AR and word cards) on participants' states of flow. One of the 48 participants dropped out of the study.
The results of the GLMM revealed that words studied with the AR treatment method were more readily recalled than those studied with physical word cards at a statistically significant level (p < .001, OR = 2.19 [1.52, 3.14]). The results of the GLMM also revealed that concrete nouns were easier to recall than action verbs at a statistically significant level (p < .001, OR = 3.16 [1.58, 6.97]). The ANOVA revealed no statistical significance in the states of flow experienced across the two study methods, as measured by the JFSS. These results indicated that vocabulary study of actual objects in a three-dimensional environment is likely benefitted by the visuospatial nature and spatial affordances of the environment, that retention of newly learned L2 vocabulary might differ depending on part of speech, and that flow states were not affected by a variation in study methods compared in this study.
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