Augmented Reality as an Innovative Tool for the Training of Bilingual Education Teachers in Primary Schools

Introduction

Globalization has resulted in the need for people with knowledge of several languages to enter an increasingly competitive world in labor, economic and cultural terms (Marlina, 2013; Cummins, 2021). Learning different languages is one of the most frequent activities in elementary schools, especially in their first years of learning (The Curriculum Development Council, 2017; Rao and Yu, 2019). This last perspective has the premise that children make better use of their cognitive system than they have at those ages (Williams et al, 2021). Children who begin to know a language other than their mother tongue normally associate words with images and sounds, facilitating the assimilation of knowledge and increasing their educational interest (Roberts et al, 2018; Garton & Copland, 2019). In this context, educational technology has shown multiple advances to offer various tools related to language learning, which have been implemented in basic education because, as already mentioned, their purpose is to take advantage of the cognitive system and the plasticity so powerful that children of these ages have (Pliatsikas, 2020; Birdsong, 2018). The technological tools that are used for learning a language can facilitate a series of skills, which should be useful so that children at the basic level can communicate effectively and, if possible, develop and facilitate new educational contexts whose characteristics promote their learning (Llevot-Calvet, 2018). In this sense, it makes sense to generate new educational contexts whose implementation characteristics are not expensive, rather they are easy to implement and manage (Valverde-Berrocoso et al, 2021). That is, its costs are measured in low monetary terms, while its educational benefits are as high as possible (Kayapinar, 2021).

Technological development has shown multiple advances, which have strengthened strategies focused on the teaching-learning process (Sailer et al, 2021; da Silva et al, 2019). This progress is surpassed every day by more efficient technologies that aim to help students in their learning and support teachers in their educational process (Huang et al, 2019). Some of the new educational technologies are embedded with various devices and media such as the Internet, mobile devices, the cybernetic cloud, and various technological objects (Llevot-Calvet, 2018; Dengel et al, 2019). This is to more efficiently support the task of teaching and learning (Tzima et al, 2019). However, the new technology called Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as an innovative and efficient tool that both supports and creates new educational environments (Rohrbach et al, 2021; Karagozlu, 2021). In addition, one of the most outstanding characteristics of AR is the interactive and dynamic way in which it helps students and supports teachers so that abstract educational content is easier to understand (Buchner & Zumbach, 2020). Therefore, it is currently required to generate educational contexts whose characteristics strengthen both the learning process and build new ways of transmitting knowledge with quality (Roopa, 2021; Muhammad, 2021). In this sense, it has been observed that AR is an ideal complement for creating various educational applications. In particular, it has also been shown to be quite useful for teaching a language (Redondo, 2020; Bensetti-Benbader & Brown, 2019). This is mainly because the basic characteristics of AR are defined as a technology through which the visualization of the real environment is augmented by elements or objects generated by a computer or mobile device (Yildiz, 2021; Abad -Segura et al, 2020).