Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Scaffoldings in Improving the Abstract Genre Structure in a Collaborative Learning Environment: A CALL Study

The marriage between technology and teaching in educational milieus in recent years has been a major concern among educational researchers in general and applied linguists in particular as far as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are concerned. Augmented reality after virtual reality received much attention over the last decades in mobile assisted language learning context. AR mixes virtual world onto real environment, VR delve the participants in to the virtual world. To examine the effect of AR and VR on abstract writing of EFL students, 12 intermediate proficiency pairs (high and low proficiency) participated based on their scores on TOEFL and a hypothetical abstract writing task. The participants were required to write an abstract according to the sub-moves of Hyland's (2000) move analysis provided through three mobile applications including AR-, VR HeadSet virtual reality-, and paper-based scaffoldings for four weeks in a collaborative context. In evaluating the groups' abstract writing scores before and after the treatment, no significant differences were found among the three groups. However, the AR group revealed better mean average results (M = 33) compared to the other VR (M = 24) and paper-based groups (M = 29). Besides, the low intermediate proficiency subjects in the AR group received higher scores (M = 40) compared to heir higher counterpart (M = 37). Results imply that the integration of real and unreal worlds might be a good asset in teaching the genre of abstracts to EFL learners in general and low intermediate proficiency learners in particular.