Impact of smart immersive mobile learning in language literacy education

With the fast paced improvements in smart devices such as tablets and smartphones, many schools in the developed countries are trying to improve the traditional pedagogical methods by harnessing smart learning technology for different purposes. In this paper, we proposed the use of a smart novel educational technology to immerse the students in the learning process by engaging as many of the students' senses as possible through the creation of interactive elements and entertaining features. This process is also called edutainment, combining both education and entertainment, and it works by making students learn subconsciously in an immersive manner. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how an immersive augmented reality application can work in conjunction with Arabic schoolbooks in an attempt to improve Arabic literacy for children in the UAE. The reason for this is that children in the UAE are being exposed to English most of the time and, as a consequence, gradually losing their mother tongue. A focus field-study was then conducted on two groups of Grade 1 students to get a pre-understanding in the impact of such educational technology, targeted for younger learners, in language literacy education.