Journal Review : Language Learning Motivation from a Games (2)

Hi, welcome back !! Now, I would like to continue reviewing the previous journal, it is about Digital Video Games on students' Language Learning Motivation.

As I read on the background, It has been indicated that since many learners automatically assume educational games to be boring (Kinzie & Joseph, 2008), learner should identify suitable commercial DVGs for students' motivation. There are six activity modes that appear to best reflect junior high school students’ game-play preferences including active, explorative, problem-solving, strategic, social, and creative activities (Kinzie & Joseph, 2008). Commercial DVGs has that in said activities than Educational DVGs. Thus, they purpose to minimize the 'boring' of DVGs and attach the children to play it. 

DVGs may increase intrinsic and/or extrinsic motivation for replays (Kuo & Chuang, 2016), which are viewed as processes that ultimately result in acquisition and mastery of new knowledge. (e.g a second language). For language learning purposes, it is important to select a commercial DVG in which language plays a role in achieving the ultimate goal of the game, in victory, so that while enjoying playing, the DVG gamers would be involved with language processing as well. 

Malone and Lepper were the first to study motivation in educational games (as cited in Tzeng, 1999). They identified four factors including challenge, curiosity, control, and fantasy, constituting building blocks of intrinsic motivation in games. 

There are a research that using DVGs as learning motivation for a foreign language. Student asked to play a DVGs at their home continuously 10days and learner collecting data from involved pre-test and post-test. Results showed that the DVG raised the students’ motivation and participants believed that the DVG provided them with skills regarding cooperation, collaboration, and teamwork. The study concluded that gaming helps motivate students for second language learning and can be used as a means to move beyond the constraints of traditional classrooms. 

Teamwork has also been shown to enhance LLM (Dörnyei, 1994, 1997). There are also kind of DVGs that needs a good teamwork or in managing team.Multiplayer DVGs such as League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) and Defense of the Ancients (IceFrog, 2015) tend to specify a role for each avatar. Through teamwork, these avatars can easily win the game. Understanding how these roles work is based on knowing the avatars and items they need which comes from first-hand experience, item/ability thumbnails, the provided guidelines, and the language used to describe these items/abilities/avatars. Thus, DVGs provide a suitable environment to promote teamwork (Connolly et al., 2011; Vegt, Visch, de Ridder, & Vermeeren, 2015). 

That's all for today, hope you enjoy it and got another point of view about games.

See ya next week. Cheers!!