Impact of Smartphone Based Activities on EFL Students’ Engagement

Teachers all over the world strive to keep their students engaged, and research has shown that task engagement can be elevated by utilising technology to complete classroom activities. Reasons suggested for this is that technology’s alignment with students’ interests, as well as the stimulatingly transformative effect that technology can have on activities. Due to current students’ preferences, authors now encourage incorporating mobile phones into the classroom, claiming that it will improve task engagement. However, this has not been empirically proven. Therefore, this mixed method quasi experimental study examined whether two groups completing identical activities, where one group using their smartphones, would have any difference in their engagement with the given activities. The results indicated that a statistically significant difference in the initiation times and distraction between experimental and control settings. Although no significant emotional difference was observed between the groups, the students themselves indicated a significant difference in their emotional attitude towards smartphone activities as compared to paper-based ones. The smartphone group managed to engage with activities, thereby overcoming many factors which affected the control groups’ engagement levels.