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It is beneficial for students to experience situational learning, especially for English as a foreign language (EFL) learning. Providing more listening and speaking opportunities could help EFL students with English learning. Our research proposes a listening and speaking practice system employing personal digital assistants (PDAs) for situated learning using contexts with which students would be familiar. The proposed system attempts to help participating EFL students by presenting learning contexts in familiar situations, such as during lunch at school. The results show that the proposed system and designed activities provided EFL elementary school students with listening and speaking practice opportunities in basic vocabulary and simple sentences with the support of familiar, situational learning. In the experiment, the experimental group learned multimedia-based learning materials about food materials at lunch with PDAs. In contrast, the control group learned via paper-based learning materials in class without real contextual support. After the experiment, findings reveal that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in learning achievement. By providing recommended sample voices recorded by peers, students in the experimental group could repeatedly listen to the recordings in familiar situations, thus obtaining more opportunities to practice and interact with peers later. The other significant finding is that the number of peers used to practice speaking English in daily contexts, defined as practice diversity, was significantly correlated to learning improvement. That is, when students practiced speaking English with an increased number of peers, in familiar contexts, their English skills improved. After interviews with students, an interesting phenomenon was identified; students in the experimental group extended their learning from school to home. Furthermore, students' learning was not only a deliberate event or situation -learning also took place spontaneously in their daily lives. Therefore, the proposed system and activities can help EFL students, particularly novices, listen to and speak English in familiar situational contexts.

Contextual learning has been recognized as an important method for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning and drama was also usually employed to be a good activity for EFL learning which guided learners to interact and use body language to practice English. However, there were few studies to consider both drama and authentic contexts together with mobile devices to facilitate EFL learning. In this research, we developed a contextual drama (CD) system in mobile devices for EFL learning. Students can use CD system to prepare, make, and conduct drama with voices, photos, and texts in authentic contexts to improve English learning. Our goal is to examine how CD system and collaborative CD influences students' learning behaviors and achievement. One quasi-experiment design was conducted with 78 participants, who were the fifth-grade elementary school students during a 5-week experimental period. The results demonstrated that drama-based learning in authentic contexts resulted in better learning achievements than traditional methods. Moreover, we found that collaboration, as key in drama-based EFL learning, could promote peer discussion and therefore help students improve students' storytelling and writing abilities. Students' improved abilities were demonstrated in their sentence complexity and diversity. Additional analysis results derived from the interviews and observations also revealed that students' body languages usage and their engagement in drama activities have significant effect on their learning achievement.

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