The Effects of Smartphone-based Online Interactions:

The current study aims to investigate the effects of using smartphone-based online interactions on Korean students’ English speaking performance. Seventy-two undergraduates enrolled in three TOEIC Speaking courses participated in this study and belonged to one of three interaction groups: 23 in a teacher-student interaction group, 22 in a peer interaction group, and 27 in a small-group interaction group. Each group was taught with the same offline class contents and assigned to two online tasks over six weeks through use of the well-known smartphone-based online community, KakaoTalk. The pretest-posttest design was adopted to determine whether smartphone-based online interactions were effective in improving speaking performance. A questionnaire was given to investigate students’ perceptions toward smartphone-based interactions. The results showed that the students of all three groups significantly improved their speaking performance after experiencing smartphone-based online interactions. The students who interacted with the teacher and with their peers had better performance than those who interacted in the small-group. Questionnaire results showed that the students perceived smartphone-based interactions as a useful tool to practice English speaking. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.