The Impact of Using Mobile Phones on Iraqi Secondary School Students’ Performance in Writing The Phonemic Transcription of English Words

Technology plays a major role in our daily life. This role cannot be neglected especially in the field of education. Mobiles which are the most common devices of this technology become very necessary. Nowadays, persons cannot go anywhere without it. In Iraq, students could not take mobile with them to secondary schools or colleges before five years ago according to the instructions of the educational authorities but now they are allowed to do that. This device like others has itsown advantages and disadvantages. Theeffect of using it appears on the youth who spend hours using it daily. This study ignores the disadvantages and focuses on the advantages of it. The effect of Mobile as a Helping Device on EFL learners’ levels in writing the phonemic transcription of English words is studied in details. The sample of this studyconsists of two groups taken from secondary schools namely thefifth secondary school students. The first group (twenty-five female students) is taken from Al –Nahdha Schoolfor Girls while the second is chosen from Beirut Secondary School forGirls (twenty-five female students). These two schools are located in Dorra, Baghdad. This sample is intentionally chosen because most of the students do not have mobiles. Most of the Iraqi families do not let their daughters have mobiles because of the social traditions adopted and to avoid any problems due to their use. This paper aims to prove that this device plays an important role in helping students write the correct phonetic transcription of English words. Itis hypothesized that Iraqi secondary school students who have mobile phones which are used as a helping device in learning English can write a better phonemic transcription of words than those who do not use them. The findings of this study validate this hypothesis since the percentages of the correct answers in the experimental group is higher than those in the control group due to the use of mobiles.