Investigation of mobile application uses in primary school second grade students in foreign language learning

Foreign language teaching is seen as an area that is emphasized in education policy of many countries and should be included in education programs from a young age. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of mobile applications used at an early age in foreign language learning on the academic success and attitudes of students in the English lesson. In this study, semi-experimental study design and content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, were used based on the quantitative research method. The study group of the research consists of 87 students studying in the second grades of a private school in Malatya province. While selecting the study group, easy accessible / suitable sampling method was taken as basis. Within the scope of the study, students are divided into Experiment-1, Experiment-2 and Control groups. Accordingly, students in the Experiment-1 group were taught English lessons in a face-to-face classroom environment and the "Duolingo" mobile application under the supervision of parents; In the Experiment-2 group, English lessons were explained in the face-to-face classroom environment and the "Memrise" mobile application was used under the supervision of the parents. On the other hand, English lessons were taught as usual without any intervention to the control group. In addition, the opinions of the students and parents of the Experiment-1 and Experiment-2 groups regarding the mobile applications used at the end of the study were obtained. In the study, Academic Achievement Test was applied to all three groups separately as pretest and posttest. Later, the Attitude Scale towards Primary School English Lesson (ISCI) was applied separately to each of the three groups. The data obtained at the end of the research were transferred to the electronic environment regularly. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the content prepared for Experiment-1 and Experiment-2 groups increased the students' English success and attitude level compared to the Control group. In line with the results obtained by comparing the groups with respect to each other, it was concluded that the experimental-2 group had higher scores in the academic success of the course compared to the experiment-1 and control groups, and the experiment-1 group had higher scores in the attitudes of the students compared to the experiment-2 and control groups. In summary, according to both test results and interview results, the "Memrise" mobile application is more successful in developing academic skills with its structure designed to develop all four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), while the "Duolingo" mobile application is rewarding and gaining features. It was observed that it was effective in developing positive attitudes among students, but this difference did not reflect enough on student success. The research has revealed that using mobile applications in general will make foreign language learning more efficient at an early age. In addition, this study is considered to be important for mobile application developers in foreign language learning, for those who will learn foreign languages at an early age.