Using Native Tongue Mnemonics to Enhance English Learning

Abstract

An individual's language and culture play an important part in their learning process [9]. In this paper, we develop a mobile application called "Mnemorizer" to help international students learn English vocabulary for standardized tests. We use mnemonics and gamification to aid learning and present results that indicate that native tongue mnemonics are more effective than mnemonics in English. Initial results of this ongoing project provide motivation for our future work, which will leverage crowdsourcing techniques to build a database of mnemonic devices to support a broader subset of languages and cultures.