The Future of Education

In recent years, with the spreading of mobile phones, mobile applications have become a popular learning tool for foreign languages learners. Many studies have shown evidence of mobile applications in promoting foreign language learning.People can learn English anywhere and anytime by the mobile technologies. Thousands of language learning applications are made to meet each different learner’s demand. To find out the tendency of the popular English learning applications’ developments becomes a better way to know  the expectations of English learners.This study conducted a comparison about the evaluation of mobile application effectiveness for English learning made by Japanese and Chinese users. Functions of mobile applications available at the apple store are investigated and analyzed in detail. The difference in the evaluation of the popularity of mobile applications shows the diverse expectation of English learners from these two countries. This paper offers a new perspective to mobile application producers and English teachers regarding the issue of how to improve learning effects. By integrating useful functions into the current system, mobile applications can better meet the needs of language learners. English teachers can get hints from this study as how to give instructions to help students make progress in learning.

Keywords: mobile phone application, English Language Teaching (ELT), Chinese and Japanese English learner, learning expectation