The Effectiveness of Collaborative Mobile-Assisted English Learning (C-MAEL) for Enhancing Academic English Reading Comprehension of University Students at Guangxi University of Science and Technology

บทคัดย่อ

The present study had 3 primary objectives: 1) examine the factors affecting academic English reading comprehension of university students in Guangxi Province, 2) confirm the appropriateness of Collaborative Mobile-Assisted English Learning (C-MAEL) model to enhance English learning achievements of university students at Guangxi University of Science and Technology, and  3) study the effectiveness of Collaborative Mobile-Assisted English Learning (C-MAEL) for enhancing academic English reading comprehension of university students at Guangxi University of Science and Technology. The research methodology was structured into three distinct phases: Phase I: studying the internal and external factors affecting students’ academic English reading comprehension gathering data through questionnaires administered to 275 undergraduate students and interviews conducted with 7 lecturers from 3 universities in Guangxi Province; Phase II: developing Collaborative Mobile-Assisted English Learning (C-MAEL) instructional model for enhancing academic English reading comprehension based on instructional model development theory and the findings from Phase I, plus rigorous evaluation against four standards: utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy by 5 experts using an instructional model evaluation form; and Phase III: investigating the effectiveness of the developed instructional model – putting it into practice through lesson plans for experimentation. Data collection encompassed pretest and posttest from 39 Guangxi University of Science and Technology in semester 2 academic year 2023.  Statistical analysis techniques such as frequency, percentage calculations, means, standard deviations, interpretation, and content analysis were employed to analyze the collected data. The findings of this study can be summarized as follows: 1) The internal factors affecting for undergraduate students’ academic English reading comprehension were learning engagement, motivation, needs, satisfaction, attitude, and autonomous learning while external factors were teaching model, teaching activities, learning environment, learning tasks, relationship between teacher and students, and materials and resource. 2) C-MAEL learning instructional model to enhance undergraduate students’ academic English reading comprehension consisted of 5 components i.e., principle and rationale, learning objectives, contents, methods of teaching and materials, and evaluation. After programme evaluation (utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy), such a model was 100% confirmed by 5 experts for further Implementation. 3) Based on the testing results, the mean posttest scores (M = 86.96, SD = 7.48) were significantly higher than the mean pretest scores (M = 66.54, SD = 10.31). The paired-sample t-test conducted on the single sample group yielded a t-value of -15.91 and a p-value of .00, indicating that the differences between the pretest and posttest scores were statistically significant at the 0.05 level (*p < .05).