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:

anke.berns@uca.es (Dep. of French and English Philology, UCA)

manuel. palomo@uca.es (Dep. of Computer Science, UCA)

juanmanuel.dodero@uca.es (Dep. of Computer Science, UCA)