Presentation at EC-TEL Conference 2013
-
Upload
anke-berns -
Category
Education
-
view
50 -
download
2
description
Transcript of Presentation at EC-TEL Conference 2013
Using a 3D online game to assess students’ foreign language acquisition &
communicative competence
Anke Berns
Manuel Palomo Duarte
Juan Manuel Beardo Dodero
Concepción Valero-Franco
Content
■ Purpose of the Study■ Research Question &Teaching Framework ■ Blended Teaching & Computergames ■ Game-Design & Platform Architecture■ Exerimental Setting■ Results & Future Work
1. Purpose■ to present the results of an ongoing study which has been
carried out with students of a German Foreign Language course at the University of Cádiz
■ to explore the possibilities of enhancing students’ foreign language acquisition & communicative competence through the use of a 3-D online game
2. Research questions■ How does participation in a cooperative online game affect
students` interaction & communicative competence?
■ Does the designed game enhance students` fluency & accuracy?
■ Which factors influence students` interaction & communication with others?
3. Teaching framework■ our students are usually enrolled in very large size foreign
language courses
■ students often lack of opportunities to use & interact with other speakers in the target language
■ language practice outside the classroom becomes extremely important to provide students with enough language practice
4. Blended teaching practices■ many universities & teachers have introduced in their teaching
practices the use of VLEs (WebCT, Moodle, Second Life, OpenSim etc.)
■ VLEs provide teachers & students with access to learning materials, services & applications anytime, any place & at any pace
■ most widely used LMS/VLE offer a huge variety of tools (wikis, discussion forums, blogs, chats & messagging) which facilitate versatile interaction beyond the classroom
■ in the last decade there has been an increasing trend to explore the motivational & educational potential of computergames to enhance foreign language learning
■ amongst the often employed computergames are those which allow & encourage players to collaborate & interact with other players (e.g MMPOG: World of Warcraft, Lineage; Social games: Pulitzer game) (Reinders, 2012; Cornillie, 2012)
5. Cooperative computergames & SLA
■ the development of a foreign language is almost wholly dependent on the amount of comprehensible input a learner receives (Krashen 1985, Warschauer 2011)
Hence it is important:
■ to provide learners with those kinds of interactions that facilitate the intake of comprehensible input (Doughty 1986, Pisa 1994, Gass & Varonis 1994, Long 1996)
■ to stimulate the production of language output (Swain, 2005)
■ to encourage negotiation of meaning (Pica, 1994)
■ to facilitate noticing (Schmidt, 1990)
■ to provide learners with opportunities to become aware of their weaknesses & deficits in the target language (Swain, 2005)
■ pushed output provides learners with opportunities to get useful feedback & thus to modify their language output
■ pushed output is important to focus learners attention on form and feedback & thus provide them with the possibility to modify their language output & competences in the target language (Swain, 2005; Westhoff, 2004)
6. Game-Design Level 1: Memory
7. Architecture of the platform
8. Experimental setting 8.1 Study participants & procedure
■ 12 students were selected from the same German Language course
■ students were placed in 3 different categories: -category 1 (very active students) -category 2 (less active students) -category 3 (active & less active students)
8.2 Data collection & analysis
▪ transcripts of students’ text chat interaction which permit us to analyze students’ interaction & use of the target language
▪ pre- and post-tests to analyze the impact on students’ foreign language acquisition & communicative competence
8.3 Pre- and posttests
■ students were asked to fill out the three part test once before and once after performing the game
■ test 1 focuses on students’ vocabulary knowledge
■ test 2 focuses on students’ grammar knowledge
■ test 3 focuses on students’ writing skills & communicative competence
8.3.2 Pre- & posttests
Test 1 Test 2
Test 3
9. Results■ from the pre-and post-test has shown that all students, no matter
what category they belong to, increased their grades in the 3 aspects assessed
pre-test post-test
Categories 1 to 3
■ the number of lexical mistakes, use of native words & confirmation requests in the chats was lower in those categories where at least one of its members had previously shown a high willingness to interact and communicate (category 1 & 3)
■ feedback is higher in categories 2 & 3. It seems that there is more need for feedback
■ the results are especially interesting in terms of writing skills & grammatical accuracy and their improvement on part of some participants in category 2 & 3
Writing skills
Category 2 Category 3
Grammatical accuracy
Category 2 Category 3
10. Future work■ a deeper statistical analysis on a greater data set is
necessary to find reasonable evidences in favor of the virtual game learning experience
■ to prepare the experimental environment to automate text chat interaction analysis using natural language processing tools
■ to detect regular communication patterns in text chats before being supervised to confirm or revoke its validity as evidences of communicative competence
DAIFCEALE
Berns, A. et. al (2013). ‘Game-like language learning in 3D virtual environments’. Computers & Education, 60 (1), pp. 210-220.
AcknowledgementsThis research was supported by the following projects:
■ ASCETA (Ref. P09-TIC-5230)
■ Proyecto Innovación Docente, UCA (PI-13-011)
■ OpenDiscoverySpace (CIP-ICT_PSP-2011-5)
■ ABANT (TIN2010-198727TSI)
For any further question please write us an email:
[email protected] (Dep. of French and English Philology, UCA)
manuel. [email protected] (Dep. of Computer Science, UCA)
[email protected] (Dep. of Computer Science, UCA)