This research was funded by the Jiangxi Provincial Social Science Project ‘A Study of Cognitive Effects of Embodied Experience on L2 Semantic Processing’ (25YY23D); the 2025 Ministry of Education Industry-University Collaborative Education Project ‘Teaching Reform of University English Reading-Writing-Translation Course Cluster Based on Smart Classrooms’; Research Centre for Applied Translation of Transportation and Engineering-Jiangxi Provincial Key Research Base for Humanities and Social Sciences of Higher Education Project ‘Research on Translation of International Engineering Project Documents and Construction Manuals’ (JD20016); two East China Jiaotong University Teaching Reform Projects: ‘AI-Enpowered Teaching Reform and Practice in the Course Intercultural Communication from the Perspective of International Communication’ (1103626044) and ‘Innovative Practice of Integrating Jiangxi Cultural Features into the Ideological Political Education in the Course the Glimpse of Chinese Culture’ (1103625029).
Abstract
Driven by educational digitalization and the New Liberal Arts initiative, smart classrooms have become central to instructional reform for English majors at universities in China. Conventional English instruction, grounded in a disembodied cognition paradigm that reduces language acquisition to rote memorization of abstract symbols, largely neglects bodily perception, situated experience, and environmental interaction. Embodied cognition offers a different account of how language is learned. Rather than locating cognition in the head alone, it holds that meaning is inseparable from bodily perception, physical movement, and the environment in which a person acts. This study draws on questionnaire responses from 247 English majors to investigate whether smart classrooms—in their present form—either support or undermine students’ learning. The data show a mixed picture. Students generally welcome smart-classroom instruction and report real gains in engagement and interaction, particularly in listening and speaking courses. At the same time, nearly half of them struggle with basic platform operation, attention fragmentation is widespread, and the deeper integration of technology with embodied experience remains largely unrealized. On the basis of these findings, we put forward a four-dimensional model—‘Embodiment-Technology-Instruction-Assessment’—intended to reorient smart classrooms toward what embodied cognition suggests language learning should actually look like.
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How to cite this paper
The Impact of Implementing Smart Classrooms on Second Language Acquisition Among University English Majors: An Embodied Cognition Perspective
How to cite this paper: Feilin Lan, Meng Fan. (2026). The Impact of Implementing Smart Classrooms on Second Language Acquisition Among University English Majors: An Embodied Cognition Perspective. The Educational Review, USA, 10(4), 211-216.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2026.04.005