Ubiquitous English Learning System with Dynamic Personalized Guidance of Learning Portfolio

Situated learning has been recognized as an effective approach in enhancing learning impressions and experiences for students. Can we take advantage of situated learning in helping students who are not English native speakers to read English articles more effective? Can the effectiveness of situated learning be further promoted by individual portfolio? This paper proposes a situated and reading-based English learning system that integrates a reading guidance mechanism into the development of an English learning environment. To facilitate reading, the system offers not only translation of the vocabulary but also the powerful functions such as translation, pronunciation and explanations of sentences, paragraphs and articles. More importantly, the guidance mechanism provides personalized reading suggestions for increasing learning performance according to the assessment of defined dynamic parameters. The assessment refers to a detailed record of the learner behavior, kept as a Learning Portfolio by the system, for improving the accuracy of reading guidance. The experiments show that learners who adopted a situated and reading-based English learning system exhibited higher quality performance than those who adopted conventional learning systems. And, the performance of learners who utilized the learning support system with a reading guidance mechanism was of higher quality than that of learners who merely utilized a simple situated learning system.