Development of Listening and Linguistic Skills through the Use of a Mobile Application

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a research that was developed with eight groups of students of undergraduate programs of the Language Institute at Santiago de Cali University. The research was developed with four groups of students who used a mobile application developed jointly by foreign language professors, a software development professor and systems engineering students, as a support tool for individual practice of English level 1 (Test groups) and an equal number of groups of students who did not use the application (Control groups). No mobile applications already available in the market were used because none of them fit the sequence of topics that the course develops along the semester, thus, it was necessary to design an application tailored to the different themes, grammar and vocabulary requirements that were developed by the students. In both cases, a written test was performed at the beginning and end of the course in order to establish the benefit that the application could offer to the students in the test groups. The results indicate that the frequent use of the mobile application might have a positive impact on the development of both listening and linguistic competencies of English.