dc.description.abstract | In this globalized generation, English is a necessary skill for international communication. Learning English is a challenging task for native Chinese learners, especially English speaking. In the traditional English classroom, there is usually a lack of native environment for practicing speaking English. Recently, more and more research has been conducted on the use of digital game-based learning for English speaking instruction to make the learning process fun and to help learners improve their motivation and learning outcomes. In digital game-based learning environment, digital badge mechanisms provide goals of badges that support learner to increase willingness to engage in learning activities because the process of achieving goals of badges can effectively immerse learners in learning. However, badges are not always a positive effect on learning. Badges may have negative effects that will shift the focus of learning activities from learning to collecting badges. Therefore, there were few researches on the application of badges to education for unexpected characteristics, most of which are applied to online learning or the classroom. We have not found the application of unexpected badges to digital game-based English pronunciation learning, and compared the effects of expected badge on learners. In addition, some studies mentioned adding some unexpected badges on the expected badges to increase learners′ learning interest. In this study, we developed a game learning system called "Legends Island Adventure", which combines English pronunciation learning with MMORPG, and designed learning environments for different badge mechanisms with different characteristics of expectancy, namely, expected badge mechanism edition, unexpected badge mechanism edition, and expected and unexpected badge mechanism edition. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects and correlation of different badge mechanisms on learners′ English speaking learning performance, game performance, learning motivation, gaming flow experience, and behavior patterns in a digital game-based English speaking learning environment, and to investigate the effects of different prior knowledge on learners′ English pronunciation learning performance, gaming performance, learning motivation, and gaming flow experience in the same learning environment.
A total of 60 learners in this study are divided into three groups (expected badge group, unexpected badge group, and mixed expected badge group). According to different digital badge mechanisms, there were 20 students in each digital badge mechanism group. Furthermore, each digital badge mechanism group was divided into subgroups by English pronunciation ability. In the three groups, there are 10 learners of high English pronunciation ability and 10 learners of low English pronunciation ability. The research tools in this study included English pronunciation learning performance test, learning motivation scale, flow exprience scale and system log file. According to the results of this study, in the MMORPG-based digital game-based English pronunciation learning environment. The effects of different digital badge mechanisms on learners are mainly found as follows: (1) learners in different badge groups improved significantly in English pronunciation learning performance. However, in post-test and improvement scores, the mixed expected badge group and the expected badge group were significantly better than the unexpected badge group. (2) In the results of the gaming performance, expected and unexpected badge group was the best, followed by the expected badge group and the unexpected badge group. (3) There was no significant difference in learning motivation and gaming flow among all groups. (4) The behavior patterns of the expected badge group were roughly the same as that of the expectable plus unexpected medal group. Only the unexpected badge group showed several unique behaviors shifts, and the total number of behaviors shifts of each group was similar. (5) The expected badge group showed the most correlations between English pronunciation learning effectiveness and medal-like game effectiveness, the unexpected badge group showed the most correlations between English pronunciation learning effectiveness and learning game performance, and the mixed expected badge group showed the least correlations. However, none of the three groups showed significant correlations between learning motivation and game mind flow.
In the MMORPG-based digital game-based English pronunciation learning environment, the effects of different badge mechanisms on learners with different English pronunciation ability are mainly found as follows: (1) The results of English pronunciation performance of learners with different pronunciation abilities in different badge groups were significantly improved. (2) The results of gaming, badging and assistance categories gaming performance showed the most significant differences in the expected badge group. The number of significant differences in learning categories gaming performance of different English pronunciation ability learners in the unexpected badge group is the most. The expected badge group and the unexpected badge group only showed a difference in the total learning task accuracy of 90% of the learning category gaming performance. All the above results showed that the high English pronunciation ability learners were greater than the low English pronunciation ability learners
The results of this study will be helpful for researchers who combine digital game-based learning with English pronunciation learning to design the badge mechanism in games and provide future research directions. In addition, the system developed in this study can also provide future researchers with different badge mechanisms in different teaching environments. | en_US |