Abstract:

We present a case study using an online CALL game with secondary school students, where we examine the question of how different factors, such as gamification elements, difficulty of exercises and personal background can influence students’ behaviour in regards to performance and motivation in CALL. For this study we use CALL-SLT, a speech-enabled online CALL tool for beginner learners of English [1]. The tool consists of 8 interactive and dialogue-based lessons that are tailored to the content of a commonly used English textbook in Switzerland [2]. The lessons are designed to help students practise their productive and receptive skills in a non-judgmental environment, where simple feedback (correct vs. incorrect) is provided in real-time by the computer. The tool was used in eight secondary school classes (approx. 80 active users) all across German-speaking Switzerland for a duration of four weeks each. The experiment setup asked the students to take a placement test and fill in a questionnaire on personal background in the beginning, to use the CALL-SLT tool during four weeks as a homework assignment at home and to then take another placement test, as well as to fill in a qualitative feedback questionnaire in the end of the experiment.

The first question of interest is if the “gamification” of the tool has a positive effect on students’ motivation. In order to measure this, we compared two versions of CALL-SLT in four parallel classes, each pair being assigned to the same English teacher. One version contained gamification elements, as well as a feedback module, which assisted the students in problem solving and gave motivational feedback on their performance [3]. The other version worked as the first one, except that all gamification elements were hidden. In the last week of usage the versions were exchanged, so that the students could give qualitative feedback on the two versions in the end. We specifically examine the influence of gamification elements, such as scores and performance-linked badges on the performance and the motivation of the participating students.

We will then also examine the influence of the exercises’ difficulty on motivation. We apply both qualitative as well as quantitative measurements: on one hand we take into account a purely qualitative measure, which is the subjective perception of the difficulty by the students (post-questionnaire), and on the other hand we calculate the abandon rate after difficult prompts.
The third question concerns the influence of students’ personal background on their performance. The language biography questionnaire gives valuable information on the students’ linguistic background, such as their mother tongue, other languages they know, their ease in working with computers, as well as their affinity for learning English. The students’ performance on the pre- and post-placement test is also taken into account to shed light on this question.

References:
[1] Baur C., Rayner M, Tsourakis N. (2013). A Textbook-based Serious Game for Practising Spoken Language. 6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI), Seville, Spain.
[2] Baur C., Rayner M., Tsourakis N. (2014). Crafting Interesting Dialogues in an Interactive Spoken CALL System. Proceedings of EDULEARN, Barcelona, Spain.
[3] Tsourakis N., Rayner M., Baur C. (2014). Formative Feedback in an Interactive Spoken CALL System. Proceedings of the WOCCI Workshop, Singapore.

Keywords:

CALL, Gamification, Speech Recognition, Motivation.