44 International Arab Journal of e-Technology, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2011 A Multimedia Offline Cell Phone System For English Language Learning Osama Salameh Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology, Arab American University-Jenin, Palestine Abstract: Among mobile computing devices, cell phones are the most wide spread devices and are available in the hands of almost every university student. Other than being portable phones, many are equipped with functionalities including internet access, mp3/mp4 player, digital camera video recorder etc. and can run multimedia content. These features make them attractive as educational tools as well. In this paper we present an offline Flash-based prototype system for English language learning using cell phones. The system consists of ten Learning Objects (LO) constructed using the multimedia approach. Initial testing demonstrated the efficiency of the system and it was extremely well received by students. Keywords: Mobile learning, Flash Technology, Cell phone. Received August 30, 2009; Accepted May 9, 2010 1. Introduction Among mobile computing devices, cell phones are the most wide spread devices and are available in the hands of almost every university student. Other than being portable phones, many are equipped with functionalities including internet access, mp3/mp4 player, digital camera, video recorder and many are Flash-enabled and/or Java-enabled and can run multimedia contents including audio and video. Some cell phone manufacturers, bind learning software in their products to add extra value to attract customers [13]. The software includes e-dictionary, flash card software, quiz software and others. In our opinion, these products are not sufficient for learning in general because of its dependence on the cell phone manufacturer what makes the dissemination of learning material difficult. Also these products are not integrated into one system with clear pedagogic objectives. Further more, the user is forced to put extra effort to switch between programs while learning. Based on a questionnaire, almost 100% of the Arab American University-Jenin students are cell phone owners. This is the primary reason for our interest to integrate cell phones into the educational process. Due to its deep penetration and its ubiquity the cell phone seems to be the ideal “anytime, anyplace” educational technology [6]. Our objective is to provide an efficient English as a second language (ESL) learning system through cell phones. This paper presents a system of ten Learning Objects (LO) for English language learning designed to run on cell phones. English language learning was chosen as a case study for the following reasons: on one hand, low level English language skills of students in general (This is evident from university placement tests). On the other hand there are many obstacles when it comes to recruit native instructors. In addition, providing efficient ESL learning material would help a wide range of students since English is the language of instruction at the university. The place to test the system is the university English Language Centre (ELC). This paper is organized as follows: in the next section we discuss some of the related work. Then we describe the proposed system. Section 4 evaluates the system and reports results of the user acceptance test. Finally, we will conclude and look ahead towards future enhancements. 2. Related Work Several projects tried to integrate cell phones into language learning. The use of SMS to teach English language is reported in [14-16]. [16] focused on providing vocabulary instruction by SMS. Short mini- lessons emailed to students three times a day. Lessons defined five words per week. The results indicated that students receiving messages scored twice higher than students receiving their lessons on paper. Despite the fact that this teaching method was effective, it is limited to text only. Audio clips have been used to help with pronunciation for English as a second language [9]. The results of this work indicated that the content should be in short units. Another study [17] used audio to help Japanese students distinguish phonemic contrasts in English language successfully. A new and better way to deliver audio clips are Podcasts [10]. Podcasts or audio blogs are downloadable broadcasts with really simple syndication (RSS) feeds which