A Chinese language learning application that integrates generative AI into augmented reality environment to improve children’s literacy and reading skills

While mobile applications are increasingly popular and effective for early childhood Chinese learning, the existing tools often suffer from fixed interaction flow, inflexible learning content, and a lack of personalized feedback. This severely limit the development of children’s Chinese literacy and reading skills. To address these limitations, this study integrates Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) with Augmented Reality (AR) to improve children’s literacy and reading skills, where AR environment can be used to provide children with a multi-modal interactive learning experience, whilst GAI technology enables the provision of customized learning guidance and dynamically generated learning resources. Additionally, we designed and implemented the Chinese learning application (GAR-CL) based on this approach, and a quasi-experimental study with 80 children and 10 parents was conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. Experimental results indicate that the experimental group (40 children) using GAR-CL demonstrated significantly superior learning performance compared to the control group (40 children) using AR applications without GAI, while also experience lower cognitive load. Additionally, questionnaire and interview results reveal that both children and parents expressed high satisfaction and strong willingness to use GAR-CL application.