Exploring ELT Students' Perception about Mobile Learning in English Vocabulary Acquisition

SUMMARY Ristanti, Iftitah Fildzah. 2017. Exploring ELT Students’ Perception about Mobile Learning in English Vocabulary Acquisition. Sarjana’s Thesis, Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Universitas Negeri Malang. Advisors: (1) Dr. Utari Praba Astuti, M.A., (2) Dr. Emalia Iragiliati, M.Pd. Keywords: Vocabulary Acquisition, Perception, Mobile Learning, Mobile Devices. The rapid development of mobile technology leads people to integrate the function of mobile devices in their life. Mobile devices such as smartphones, computer laptops, and tablet computers, which were firstly made basically for communication are now undeniably being an absolute need for people not only to communicate but also to help them do many other things in many different fields. One of them is in English language learning. This phenomenon is seen as an opportunity to utilize the mobile technology for learning. Meanwhile, vocabulary plays an important role in English language learning. It is considered as a building block of other skills as well. One of the approaches that are now trending and also familiar to them to acquire vocabulary autonomously is mobile learning. This study aims to give the objective description of an exploration towards mobile learning used for acquiring vocabulary among the class of 2015 English Language Teaching students in Universitas Negeri Malang which is based on the students’ perception and experience. In conducting the study, the researcher uses survey which is the most appropriate design to meet the purpose. The research method used in this study is descriptive mixed-method approach, which is combination of quantitative approach to give statistical data and reach big number of population and qualitative approach to reveal in-depth results of the exploration. The data collection instruments used in this research are the researcher-made questionnaire and the interview guide. The source of data is 67 students for the questionnaires, and 12 students on the interview. The questionnaires were administered through website link which directs them to the page made by SurveyMonkey on November 2017 and was analyzed by revealing the percentage on the analyzer of the application. The interviews were done in one-on-one interview technique on November 2017 and were analyzed based on narrative analysis technique. The results of this study found out that most of the respondents had a positive opinion about the importance of mobile devices; then they also had a positive opinion about the helps mobile devices offer to support their English language learning; they mostly had a positive opinion about the assistance of mobile devices and its features to help them acquire and learn English vocabulary; they also had a positive opinion about the feelings and experiences while they use mobile devices for acquiring English vocabulary; and they had positive opinion about applying the mobile learning to their future students. Thus, this study has revealed that the challenges that the students face are: 1) technical challenges; 2) limitation of mobile technology; and 3) human factors