Keywords

1 Introduction and Contextualization

South Africa is a multilingual country with 11 official languages. The country’s language diversity does not occur in only one part of the country or affect only a specific section of the population. It has an impact on everyone in South Africa, particularly when people want to have a conversation in their first language or if they wish to have a conversation with someone with whom they do not share a language. The health-care sector in South Africa is one area where the country’s language diversity and the associated communication barriers are especially difficult to cope with.

South Africa’s health-care sector can be divided into three levels, namely clinics and Level 1 hospitals (district), Level 2 hospitals (regional) and Level 3 hospitals (central) [1]. The structure of the health-care sector provides clinical care that increases in terms of speciality and intensity according to level [1]. The ideal is that patients first visit a district hospital or clinic before they visit a regional hospital, but many patients do not adhere to this process due to weaknesses in the referral system and limited hospital coverage in their area [1]. Many South Africans living in rural areas only have access to district hospitals [2] and due to the location of the hospitals, the patients generally speak the language spoken by the communities in the area.

New medical graduates are required to complete a mandatory period of community service and they are mostly assigned to hospitals and clinics in remote areas [3]. When studying, the health professionals live in cities or large towns, where most of the universities offering qualifications in the health care sciences are situated [4] and where the language of instruction is English [5]. Because of this situation, a communication barrier often exists between the patients and the health professionals and only a few professionals are able to speak their patients’ languages.

A number of South African universities have taken note of the communication barrier and try to address it by teaching students in the health care sciences an additional language. The language taught is the language spoken by the majority of the patients in a specific area and forms part of the course curriculum. A section of the language modules focuses on the acquisition of basic communicative skills in the target language, including everyday expressions as well as high frequency vocabulary for everyday clinical situations. After achieving the outcomes of the modules, students are able to engage with patients to either retrieve information from patients or to communicate information to patients.

The learning of a new language consists of a combination of specific language subsystems, including grammar, phonology and vocabulary [6]. Vocabulary is of vital importance when learning a new language, but it often gets neglected and more focus is placed on grammar and phonology [6]. Due to time constraints during lectures, it is not always possible for lecturers to focus on vocabulary acquisition and students are often expected to learn vocabulary in their own time. Because vocabulary forms such an important part of language acquisition, a different approach is needed to assist students with learning vocabulary.

2 Application Design and Development

This study aims to assist students with their vocabulary acquisition by offering three mobile assisted language learning (MALL) applications that focus solely on vocabulary acquisition. The study was conducted at the University of Pretoria where the health care science students enroll for a SepediFootnote 1 module in their second year of studies.

The applications were designed, developed and evaluated in an attempt to determine whether or not students perceive them as being useful in acquiring vocabulary and if they have a clear preference for a specific MALL application.

2.1 Applications Design

The three MALL applications are:

  • Silent (vocabulary acquisition with text and graphics only)

  • Listen (vocabulary acquisition with text, graphics and pre-recorded audio clips)

  • Speak (vocabulary acquisition with text, graphics, pre-recorded audio clips and record-and-playback)

The three applications share basic functionalities, but each application can be seen as an application on its own. This offers students a variety in vocabulary learning tools. The design also aimed to determine if the students prefer using a specific application and the reason(s) behind their choice, should there be any.

2.2 Applications Functional Description

The Silent application is the application with the most basic functionality. The Listen application is an extension of the Silent application and plays an example pronunciation of the target word. The Speak application is an extension of the Silent and Listen applications and offers users a chance to record and listen to their own pronunciations of the target word. A summary of the functionalities of all three applications is shown in Fig. 1.

Silent Application. The user is given an English word (question), a matching picture and three Sepedi words (possible answers). One of the possible answers in Sepedi is the correct translation (answer) of the English word. The user has two attempts to choose the correct answer. If the user answers correctly, the answer is displayed on the screen and he/she can proceed to the next question. If the user fails to answer correctly on the first attempt, a message is displayed prompting another attempt. If, after two attempts, the user has still not chosen the correct answer, the correct answer is shown and the user can proceed to the next question.

Listen Application. The Listen application shares the Silent application’s functionalities, but when the user answers correctly, a pre-recorded audio version of the answer is played along with the answer displayed on the screen. Users can listen to the pronunciation as many times as they like before moving on to the next question. If the user does not choose the correct answer after two attempts, the answer is shown on the screen and the pre-recorded audio version of the answer is played. Users can then also listen to the pronunciation as many times as they like before moving on to the next question.

Speak Application. The Speak application shares the Listen application’s functionalities. When the user answers correctly, the pre-recorded audio version of the answer is played. They may listen to it as many times as they like. The user then has to record his/her pronunciation of the answer and listen to it, before they can move on to the next question. If the user still does not choose the correct answer after two attempts, the audio version of the answer is played and again they have to record their own pronunciation of the answer and listen to it before moving on to the next question.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Functional description of the three applications

Full size image

2.3 Applications Development

The applications were designed and developed for mobile devices running version 4 and later of the Android operating system and were developed in collaboration with GeckotechFootnote 2, a software development company. The devices used in the study are Asus Google Nexus 7 tablets.

3 Evaluation of the Applications

Eighty health care sciences students from the University of Pretoria were enrolled for a Sepedi module in the second semester of 2015. They were identified as ideal candidates to evaluate the applications. However, only 36 students volunteered to participate in the study.

3.1 Intervention

The students had weekly scheduled lectures for the Sepedi module. During the last 30 min the students used the applications at random and completed as many lessons on the applications as possible.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, only five sessions with the students over a period of nine weeks could take place. At the end of the intervention, 20 students had used each application at least once and completed a questionnaire on their experience with the applications.

3.2 Results

The students had a largely positive experience with the applications, with 80 % thinking the applications were very easy to use and 40 % enjoying the intervention with the applications. The majority (58 %) of the students also indicated that they would use the applications if they formed part of the Sepedi module and almost 70 % said they would recommend the applications to other students learning Sepedi.

The students were also asked to indicate which of the three applications they preferred to use overall by giving the applications a rating of 1 to 3, with 1 being the most preferred. The Listen application was rated as the students’ first preference, with 39 %, the Silent application was second with 35 % and the Speak application was third with 26 %.

Because of the importance of determining the usefulness of the applications, it was decided to include a question on the applications’ availability on the Google Play Store. If the applications were made available on the Play Store, 70 % of the students indicated that they would download them; however, only 5 % were willing to pay for the download. This is contrary to the findings of a study done at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States of America, where non-native English students evaluated an application used during the preparation of scientific presentations [7]. The students thought the application could be used in real-life situations and they were willing to pay between $1 and $2 for it [7].

A possible motivation behind the South African students’ unwillingness to pay for the applications is that they might be prepared to pay for only one application, but not all three. Further investigation into this matter is warranted as well as how to create free and useful language learning applications for the South African languages.

4 Conclusion

The feedback received from the questionnaire indicated that the students had a positive experience with the applications and that they perceived the applications as being useful as a supplementary tool for Sepedi vocabulary acquisition. The students also indicated throughout the questionnaire that the Listen application was their firm favorite.

5 Future Work

During the design process, it was decided to keep the applications as technologically simple as possible. This was done to ensure honest feedback from the students with regards to supplementary language learning applications without their opinions being influenced by the performance of the technology in any way.

Future versions of the applications will include text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies. TTS can be used to automate the generation of the example pronunciations of target words which will save time and effort when new content is added to the applications, and ASR will provide users with immediate feedback on their pronunciation.