| dc.description.abstract | English is an international language all over the world, so facilitating English ability is very essential for students. To improve English abilities, scaffolding instruction has been used to help learners learn English. This is due to the fact that the scaffolding could facilitate reflection, argumentation and scientific explanation.
Despite such advantages, the scaffolding still has some disadvantages. For instance, the scaffolding could increase the learners’ reliance on such support and they might have low motivation. To solve this problem, costed scaffolding was initially provided to prevent learners from relying on scaffolding and a digital game was applied to motivate learners.
Even though we could employ a digital game and costed scaffolding to help learners, such support might still not suit for all the learners. This might be owing to the fact that learners might possess different levels of prior knowledge, which might affect the way learners used the digital game and costed scaffolding. Therefore, there is a need to take into account prior knowledge.
Thus, this research conducted two empirical studies and considered prior knowledge as a human factor to examine learners’ reactions. In Study One, costed scaffolding tools were employed to help learners learn English, including deduction hint and limitation hint. The results from three weeks suggested that the high prior knowledge learners (HPK) tended to avoid using deduction hints initially while the low prior knowledge learners (LPK) needed to practice to avoid using those hints. Moreover, the HPK tended to use a user-driven approach to get hints from the specific letters of the answer while the LPK tended to use a system-driven approach to get the letters randomly. Furthermore, the HPK needed more powerful hints to help them complete the tasks and useless hint might hinder their performance. On the other hand, the LPK needed to rely on the hints and useful hints could improve their performance. In order to provide more powerful hints for the HPK, more powerful hints were provided in Study Two.
Accordingly, Study Two included more hints, including English hints (e.g., scaffolding information and lexical information) and game hints (e.g., local view and global view). More specifically, a digital game was also applied to improve learners’ motivation to learn English in three weeks. The result indicated that digital games might remove performance differences between the LPK and the HPK but this phenomenon disappeared after they did some practice. Moreover, the HPK seemed easier to use hints to improve their performance than the LPK. Furthermore, the LPK used both of the English hints and game hints through three weeks while the HPK did not rely on the support of the hints and they only used both English hints and game hints when they faced the challenges at the difficult level in the third week.
Even though the learners showed different learning patterns in these two studies, there were still some similarities. For instance, the HPK learnt learning strategy in both studies. In summary, the results from both studies provide deep and comprehensive understandings of costed scaffolding in the context of English learning. Such information could help instructors, researchers, and learners develop costed scaffolding that tailored the needs and preference of different prior knowledge groups. | en_US |