For many learners studying English as a foreign language, vocabulary learning is considered as boring, as they have to memorize unfamiliar words and spelling (Nguyen & Khuat, 2003) and are typically asked to complete lots of exercises. Learners find it hard to engage in such rote learning of vocabulary activities. In order to alleviate the problem, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system often use multimedia to engage learners more in the learning process. Game playing is another popular way to engage learners in language learning (Schult & Fisher,1988). Prensky (2001,p.106) listed 12 elements as to why games engage people. To name a few games motivate players (to achieve goals), gratify the ego (when winning), are fun (through enjoyment and pleasure) and spark the players’ creativity (solve the game)
The use of interactive games has impacted on the mode of learning (Foreman et all, 2004) Krasilovsky (1996,p.20) claimed that young learners tend to ‘favour “edutainment” application-academic-orientation games’. Wood (2001) investigate the use of learning games as a learning tool and concluded that game-like format could be more effective at capturing learners’ attention that traditional media such as textbooks.
This paper reports research conducted in spring of 2003 on the usefulness of online vocabulary games in English vocabulary building for some Hong Kong undergraduate engineering students in terms of learning outcomes.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
- Are online games a favourable learning tool compared with activity based learning lessons?
- Which group performs better in the post-test, experimental group or the control group?
- Does the role of the teacher as researcher and facilitator and instructions given influence the outcome of the research?
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OR LITERATURE REVIEW
This section reviews the literature on the vocabulary learning and evaluative criteria for educational web site with games.
Channel (1988) argued for the need for teaching approaches for vocabulary learning as a separate learning activity since the lexicon that organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker ‘s mind appears to be in an independent entity in processing. Carter pointed to the need for both a static approach (i.e word semantic) and dynamic approach (i.e word usage) in vocabulary teaching and learning.
As Taylor (1990) pointed out, receptive and productive skills are both within the domain of vocabulary learning. However, a learner may be overloaded if she/he is asked to learn both word meaning and form simultaneously. Thus learners may start off with learning word meaning by stressing receptive skills. After gaining a firm grasp of the word meaning, the learners may then try other mean, such as choral repetition, to help with understanding of word forms. This will assist them in using the learnt words correctly in new contexts.
Appropriate use of sensual stimuli is believed to be beneficial to learning, not only for ordinary learners but also for learners with learning difficulties (Schmidt, 2005). Allen (1983) believed that the more coherent sensual stimuli as learner is exposed to in learning process, the higher the chance that she/he will learn successfully. Taylor (1990) added that ‘a combination of stimuli is desirable, with written consolidation for adults, in order to facilitate transfer from short-term to long-term memory.
Heidemann (1995) expressed a similar view in relation to three main concerns guiding the design of the visual materials on learning web pages, namely learner-oriented principles (e.g maintaining learner motivation),picture features (e.g presenting vocabulary items in semantically related groups) and picture functions (e.g pictures are remembered better that words and can therefore act as mediators of new knowledge). The research community generally agrees that visual elements like pictures help learners remember and recall the words they have seen.
Two evaluation models, namely CARE (Yuen & So, 1990) and WSE (Kim et all. , 2001), were adopted in this study for the evaluation of educational web sites:
Educational perspective
Technical perspective
Five guidelines were described by Wood (2001) to help design effective vocabulary learning software from an educational perspective: