While literature showing researchers’ interests in MMORPGs for second language learning, empirical studies reporting on vocabulary gains made by the adoption of MMORPGs are rather restricted.
One study of the adoption of MMORPGs for vocabulary learning was carried out by Rankin, Gold, and Gooch (2006). Four ESL students who completed eighteen hours of MMORP gameplay in EverQuest Ⅱ(EQⅡ) were tested on the words they encountered in different context. The first test focused on words which were encountered once during their interaction with other players and the second test focused on words which students encountered more than five times during the conversation with NPCs. The results showed that all four students accurately defined 35% of the words in the first test and accurately defined 55% of words in the second test. This discovery indicated that the number of word occurrence in the game might
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influence the degree to which students acquire the words.
Another example is presented by Rankin, Morrison, McNeal, Gooch, and Shute (2009). There were 18 ESL students participated in the study. Six of them were assigned to the first experimental group, and they were required to played EQⅡ alone for four hours; six were in the second experimental group and they were required to grouped up with native speakers of English to play EQⅡfor four hours;
the rest six students were in the control group and were required to attend three hours of class instruction of route exercise and drills.
After treatments, the participants were tested on the knowledge of 12 college level words selected from the NPC’s speech. Two types of tests, recognition tests and use-in-sentence tests, were administered. For use-in-sentence test, the results showed that only the students in the control group exhibited significant improvement; students who played EQⅡalone or in group with English speakers made some progress but did not achieve statistical significance. For the recognition test, however, students’
posttest scores for all three treatments revealed a significant difference. Among the three groups, students who were required to play with native speakers of English achieved the highest scores. Students in the group of class instruction came in the second; students who played alone the last. The results in this study suggested that the gameplay in either of the two forms (play alone or play with native speakers) might not provide sufficient learning input to enable students to use the target words in a productive way, but it allows them to have the basic knowledge to recognize these words, and its effectiveness was more evident when they collaborate and have interaction with native speakers of English.
While the number of experimental studies on MMORPGs used for students’
vocabulary gains is limited, several studies have been carried out to examine the linguistic complexity of vocabulary embedded in MMORPGs. Some of them have
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also investigated students’ perceived gains of vocabulary when playing MMORPGs.
One example is provided by Throne, Fischer, and Lu (2012). The lexical sophistication and lexical diversity of quest texts of WoW and its famous external websites were analyzed with the measurement tools Lexical Sophistication (LS) and Mean Segmental Type-Token Ration (MSTTR). The results showed that the vocabulary occurring in the game world and game-related websites exhibited a high degree of lexical sophistication and lexical diversity, based on which the researchers concluded that MMORPGs like WoW seem to provide a linguistically diverse and complex environment for second language learners.
Hass (2012) conducted a corpus-based investigation on the levels and richness of vocabulary within three free-to-play MMORPGs and three pay-to-play MMORPGs.
She discovered that in general pay-to-play MMORPGs provided learners with significantly more exposure to the diverse vocabulary and higher-level vocabulary.
She concluded that MMORPGs might have the potential to afford a rich environment for vocabulary learning, but researchers and practitioners should be aware of the nature and the quality of the wide range of games in order to select the one that suits students’ learning needs.
In Peterson (2011)’s study, seven ESL students were asked to complete a five-point Likert Scale questionnaire about the effectiveness of playing an MMORPG WoW for second language learning. The response which students gave to the degree of vocabulary learning is 3.6, suggesting in the view of a majority of the learners, playing the game benefited vocabulary learning. Peterson (2012) conducted another study on four students’ attitude toward an MMORPG WoW for language learning.
Four students were interviewed and two out of them reported that they learned new words and some slangs in English by playing the game.
MMORPGs were generally reported to have the potential to make positive
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effects on vocabulary learning. Research on its effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition, however, is still quite scant. Further investigation on students’ vocabulary gains in the real gaming environment is needed.
2.3 Limitations in Previous Research
Previous literature has identified some affordances provides by the adoption of MMORPGs for interaction and vocabulary learning. These studies, however, are not without limitations.
2.3.1 Limitations of Previous Research on the Interaction in MMORPGs
The major limitation of previous studies is that the discourse analysis conducted by the researchers might not be elaborate enough. First, some studies used an event of dialogue as the basic unit for speech act coding rather than use a complete sentence as the unit for speech act coding. The details of students’ language output might be ignored. Second, some studies did not specify their definition of certain speech acts.
The functions of some speech acts seemed identical, which makes the classification not as meaningful as expected. For example, in Reinders and Wattana’s study, the produced sentence like “What do you mean by saying that?” seemed to belong to both the category of clarification and the category of question. Third, most of the studies do not take into consideration of the percentage that each speech act accounts for in the whole interaction. Without the information, it is still hard for us to distinguish the more frequent speech acts from the less frequent ones carried out by learners, which means that the whole picture of the intercultural interaction occurring in the MMORPG worlds might be still not clear.
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2.3.2 Limitations of Previous Studies on Incidental Vocabulary Learning in MMORPGs
As discussed in the former section, several studies have been conducted to investigate the potential of MMORPGs for vocabulary learning, but studies focusing on students’ real vocabulary gains are quite limited. There are also some limitations which need to be addressed. In Rankin et al. (2006)’s study, students’ vocabulary gains achieved statistical significance; the number of participants, nevertheless, was only four and thus the results might not be able to be generalized to other context.
Although the second study done by Rankin and his colleagues (2009) invited more students in the experiment, the researchers, however, did not take into consideration of the number of encounters with the target word in the game.
The positive effect of repeated encounters of target words has been verified by research of implicit vocabulary learning. A few decades ago, Nagy, Herman and Anderson (1985) has proposed that, in both first and second language acquisition, repeated encounters of the target word is needed to achieve full knowledge of the word because a person’s vocabulary gain is a gradual process. Repeated exposure to a word allows learners to have more exposure to its linguistic and pragmatic properties, strengthening learners’ memory of this word (Laufer & Roitblat, 2011).
Several studies have examined the number of optimal encounters of words in the context of vocabulary learning through reading. For example, Rott (1999) proposed that six encounters produced significantly larger gains. Horst and Meara’s (1998) suggested that vocabulary gains were likely to occur when words were repeated eight or more times in graded readers. Waring and Takaki (2003) discovered that it took twenty or more meetings with a word. Webb (2007) focused on the effect of word repetition on different aspects of vocabulary knowledge, including orthography, association, grammatical functions, syntax, and meaning. He discovered that as the
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number of word presentation increased, all aspects of knowledge tended to increase.
At one encounter, participants’ improvement can be found in certain aspects. At three encounters, sizable gains were observed in every aspect; at ten encounters, significantly large learning was shown in every aspect. Although the optimal number of word occurrence needed for vocabulary learning is not yet conclusive, taken as a whole, these studies provided considerable evidence that repetition yields positive effects on incidental vocabulary learning.
In terms of former research on interaction in MMORPGs, the analysis approaches seem not elaborate enough; in terms of previous studies on vocabulary learning, they failed to take the number of participants and the importance of word repetition into consideration for vocabulary learning. The current study attempts to fill the gap and provides more insights into the affordance provides by the use of MMORPGs for SLA.
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CHAPTER THREE METHODS
This chapter describes the methods employed in the current study. Section 3.1 provides the detailed information of the participants who take part in the study.
Section 3.2 introduces the game that adopted for research. In section 3.3, the methods of data collection and data analysis of speech acts, vocabulary test, and questionnaire will be presented. Section 3.4 contains data collection and analysis.
3.1 Participants
Ten English learners with intermediate level in English were invited to participate in this study. Their age ranges from 19 to 25, and the average age is 23.
All of the ten participants in this study are experienced MMORPG gamers with at least three years of MMORPG gameplay experience, but they have never played the game that adopted in the present study. The design that includes experienced players in the current study is to reduce the influence of participants’ novelty of MMORPG gameplay on the effectiveness of language learning. Previous studies have shown that novice players experienced difficulties in controlling avatars and utilizing in-game commands, which prevents them from engaging in successful game exploration or collaboration with other players, leading to the decrease of their motivation in using the games for language learning in the first place (Peterson, 2011;
2012). Since the whole gaming session for participants only lasts for twenty-eight days, and orientation for them is only one to two hours, the participants are expected to have already possessed sufficient gaming skills before attending this experiment.
Table 3 outlines the basic information of the ten participants, including their age, MMORPG gameplay experience, and English proficiency.
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Table 3
Participants’ Age, MMORPG Gameplay Experience, and English Proficiency Number Participant Age MMORPG
10 Participant 10 25 12 years Intermediate
~Intermediate high TOEIC 750
3.2 The Instrument
Guild Wars 2 (GW2), a newly-released sequel to Guild War, is a well-known massively multiplayer online role playing game among game players worldwide.
GW2 immerses players in the high quality three-dimensional fantasy world, in which
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players undertake solo play, collaborative play, duels, and match competitions and other achievement-related activities such as making handicrafts, selling and buying items of specific power, all of which make real-time conversation with other players become necessary. In-game mailbox, chat channel, and task instructions provide participants access to a great deal of English input and allow for output.
Compared with other traditional MMORPGs, GW2 is furthermore characterized by its Personal Story, which makes the game a highly potential medium for storytelling. Players are not only allowed to choose specific race, profession, and appearance but also their personality, image, dreams, or ambitions when creating their avatars. The choices players make would shape the background story of the virtual world in which the players are immersed. During the game playing process, every choice a player makes may also influence the plot or development of their own stories.
This specialty reflects Ang and Zaphiris’ (2008) statements that “computer games could be interactive narratives…the ”reader” to not only witness stories but to enact them.” Therefore, players in GW2 complete tasks with the expectation not only of character upgrading and but also of story development. Figure 1 shows the interface of GW2.
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Figure 1: GW2 interface
3.3 Procedure
The whole procedure takes 4 weeks (28 days), with initial orientation, four-week gameplay sessions, vocabulary pretest and posttest and questionnaire administration.
In the orientation session, information about the avatars they were required to create and the timetable for task completion were provided. The participants were instructed to install the game GW2 and the video recording device on their laptops. After the device and software were installed, they began to create avatars. When creating the avatar, participants were required to play the same role, choose the same options for personal stories, and complete the same tasks in order to have the same gaming
Players can get more information about the current task by
choosing appropriate response.
Summarized instructions for the current task
Text-based chat channel
In-game mailbox
Guilds
Detailed task instruction given by NPCs
Summarized instructions for personal story
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experience. Therefore, they would encounter the same tasks and meet the same story NPCs (detailed instructions for character creation and are shown in Appendix A).
After creating the character, the participants are required to take a pretest on target vocabulary items to assess their current knowledge of vocabulary.
During the gameplay sessions, participants were required to complete the sixteen tasks in the lowest level area, Metrica Province. In order to make sure that the participants would be able to complete all the tasks on time, the author contacted each participant regularly to check their gameplay progress. Table 4 shows the procedure of the current study.
Table 4
Procedure of the Present Study
Day Tasks Tests/ questionnaire
Before experiment
Orientation Vocabulary pretest
Day 1-7
Complte the instance in the dungeon Ascalonian Catacombs
Questionaire
In the first week (Day 1 to Day 7), the participants completed the previous eight tasks and then took the first vocabulary posttest; in the second week (Day 8 to Day 16), they completed the rest eight tasks and took the second vocabulary posttest. The 16 tasks and the sequence of these tasks which they were required to follow are shown in Table 5.
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Table 5
The 16 Tasks and the Sequence of the Tasks Task sequence Task objective
1st Support Doola’s Golemancing research
2nd Assist Professor Gahf in teaching his young progeny 3rd Assist the Opticalium with lightning research
4th Help Blopp stop the Inquest from using hylek poison to drive lake creatures crazy
5th Use Researcher Kaii’s SCRAP-Suit to help him manage Incomp’s scrap heap
6th Assist PR&T Esoterics with ooze research 7th Help Brill Alliance study the skritt
8th Help Hrouda maintain the ecosystem in spite of Dr. Bleent’s research
9th Assist Parnna’s research into the ancient transfer chamber 10th Help Shoon’s salvage krewe deal with Inquest
11th Help the Michotl tribe
12th Help the Lionguard keep the Cuatl hylek in check 13th Assist the Chaos krewe
14th Help the C.L.E.A.N. krewe
15th Help the Luminates plant krewe maintain the power grid 16th Help Peacemaker Owta disrupt the Inquest complex
To complete each task, participants would engage in certain conversation in order to acquire the detailed information they needed for the next move. Following is one example transcript of the conversation in the task “Assist Professor Gahf in teaching his young progeny.”
Professor Gahf: Young ones are so demanding. The progeny are eager to learn,
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but without the proper supervision, their excitement can lead to dangerous results.
Would you care to assist me? I’m in need of good assistants.
Player: What would you need me to do?
Professor Gahf: There are guest teaching apparatuses stationed around the area.
Use them to perform demonstrations for the progeny and allow them to experiment of their own. Just keep them safe from any results of their experimentation.
Player: Simple enough. What else?
Professor Gahf: Some progeny may have questions for more knowledgeable geniuses like you and me. Try to help those impressionable progeny in any way that you can.
Player: Anything else?
Professor Gahf: Conversely. There are some progeny who have chosen to ignore their studies and loaf around. Their unruly behavior must not be remain unreprimaneded.
Player: Understand. Is that all you need from me?
Professor Gahf: Be vigilant for Inquest recruiters. Progeny are more susceptible to their deception. Chase them off through intimidation, or physical force if necessary.
But we mustn’t allow them to contact with the progeny.
Player: Got it. I’ll get to work.
In the third week, where the participants had already finished the 16 tasks and their avatar had reached more than level 15, they could explore the virtual world based on their own will. They were required to achieve level 30 before day 21, because level 30 in GW2 is the threshold for joining a group to accomplish the major task on the special map, which is called “instance.” During the gameplay, participants are not allowed to look unknown words up in the dictionary and thus the number of word encounter becomes the sole variable of vocabulary learning in the research.
In the fourth week, the participants (with avatars at level 30 or above) were required to choose a time period to join a group play and complete the first instance of the game, which occurs in the dungeon called Ascalonian Catacombs (AC). They could either find their group members in the guild that they attended or just invite
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other players near the dungeon. They were required to find at least three or four other members to join their group because the teamwork of four or five people is necessary for group play in AC. They need to speak in English to invite others and make sure that the players whom they invited speak English to them. Since the game comes in English and Europe servers only, most of the players are from English-speaking backgrounds. It is assumed that the team members whom the participants found were native speakers of English or at least players with comparatively higher English ability. In the present study, they would be termed as “fluent English speakers.” The duration of the instance is about one to two hours, depending on members’ combat effectiveness and collaboration.
3.4 Data Collection and Analysis 3.4.1 Video Recording
To answer research question one that what kind of speech acts that language learners carry out during the interaction in the MMORPG world, the ten participants’
gameplay was recorded when they participated in the instance with other random players in the dungeon Ascalonian Catacombs, where they were expected to have more interaction with other players who have better command of English. The game recording software, Bandicam, was used in this study to record their text messages occurring in the in-game instance message channel or in the Skype. The collected data
gameplay was recorded when they participated in the instance with other random players in the dungeon Ascalonian Catacombs, where they were expected to have more interaction with other players who have better command of English. The game recording software, Bandicam, was used in this study to record their text messages occurring in the in-game instance message channel or in the Skype. The collected data