CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background and Motivation
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background and Motivation
Undoubtedly, English has long been considered to be the most important international language around the world as well as the most popular second language in non-English speaking countries. Wilkins (1972, p.111) pointed out that “without
grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing at all can be conveyed.” Vocabulary knowledge is the basic prerequisite to understand and to be
understood, and is viewed as a key element of proficiency in a language (Elgort, 2013). Nation (2001) indicated that the size of vocabulary knowledge is the number of words that language learners know at a particular level of language proficiency.
Rupley, Logan, and Nicholas (1999) also suggested that having excellent and huge vocabulary size is helpful to inferring the meaning of English sentences and articles.
Namely, the vocabulary size plays a crucial role in English learning. However, Oxford (1990) claimed that language learners typically have difficulty in memorizing a large number of vocabularies due to limited memory capacity in human’s brain.
Several studies (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Qian, 2002) indicated that the major obstacle in English learning is facing entirely new words in an English sentence.
Moreover, owing to the lack of the exposure to English environment, English learners frequently experienced frustration when they forget vocabularies they had acquired.
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Furthermore, traditional English pedagogies adopted in Asia cannot arouse students’
interest; on the contrary, old-fashioned pedagogies may lead to the resistance toward English language learners, followed by poor grades.
In Taiwan, traditional vocabulary teaching methods are inadequate to efficiently enlarge basic vocabulary size of EFL learners. According to Prensky’s study (2001), one of the reasons for this failure is that most of the students have primarily been educated with old paradigms and methods, resulting in the decline of the English level among Taiwanese English learners. In addition, Nunan’s study (2003) showed that the grade level in which English is introduced as a compulsory subject in schools has been shifted to lower grade in the Asia-Pacific countries such as China, Korea, and Taiwan. It’s thus an urgent issue for English teachers in Taiwan to find an effective approach to enhance students’ English level, especially vocabulary size, while fostering students’ interest toward English learning simultaneously. That is, enlarging vocabulary size of students has been a challenging task to all English teachers.
Paribakht and Wesche’s (1997) study proposed several English teaching methods for EFL teachers to enhance students’ vocabulary acquisition performance. However, they did not discuss the issue of long-term vocabulary retention. The issue of vocabulary memory retention is of great importance for EFL learners because they do not want to see their endeavor to vocabulary learning turn nothing in just a month or
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two. Saragi et al. (1978) claimed that learners have to encounter the same word for at least 10 times so that the words can be successfully moved from the short-term memory into the long-term memory. Horst et al. (1998) also found that words that were met eight times or more were more likely to be acquired. All these findings demonstrated that there is a strong relation between word exposure and vocabulary memory retention.
Many studies (Burguillo, 2010; Dickey, 2011; Ebner & Holzinger, 2007) indicated that digital games could facilitate students’ learning performance and raise their learning motivation. Also, playing digital games is particularly attractive to adolescents nowadays. A rapid developing trend is to design learning games that can run on portable devices so that learners can learn anytime and anywhere. Currently, the most popular one among all portable devices is the mobile phone. Particularly, the smart phones have offered functions that can play multimedia content, download learning applications, and edutainment games to strengthen students’ enjoyment and motivation (Claudill, 2007). Moreover, a survey conducted in Taiwan showed 127 out of 137 students prefer mobile phone rather than PC when choosing the preferred medium for learning English (Lu, 2008). This is because mobile phones are particularly useful devices that fit in pocket, are always with, and are nearly always on (Prensky, 2005). Nowadays, mobile technologies have penetrated all aspects of our
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daily activities and significantly changed our lives and behavior. Thus, modern people can use mobile devices to engage ourselves in many different kinds of learning activities anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, mobile applications, also known as APPs, are small computer programs that can run on mobile devices and perform tasks ranging from web browsing to social networking and gaming. According to Nielsen’s survey (2011), games are the top download category of APPs. With the rapid development of Internet and mobile technology, today’s mobile device users can play not only simple and embedded games but also play games on downloaded APPs (Feijoo et al., 2012). Consequently, if designed properly, mobile game APPs can be regarded as one of the potential ways to strengthen vocabulary acquisition for English learners, especially teenagers.
However, when it comes to factors related to effective learning, learners’
attention and emotion play essential roles during learning process. Jensen (1998) viewed attention as focused concentration in education field. Corno (1993) argued that attention could improve the learning performance of learners with ordinary learning motivation or competitive intention. Chen and Huang (2014) also indicated that learning was ineffective when a learner did not pay attention to learning content.
Namely, students cannot acquire any things effectively without adequate attention level. Moreover, how learners’ emotion states affect learning performance is also
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worth investigating issue. Horwitz et al. (1986) mentioned that many learners experienced anxiety when learning foreign languages. Thus, how to reduce students’
learning anxiety when learning a second language is an important issue. Arnold and Brown (1999) mentioned that ‘‘anxiety is possibly the factor that most pervasively obstructs the learning process. It is associated with negative feelings such as uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension, and tension. When learners are bored, nervous, and stressed or lack motivation, their negative emotion will be raised, thus reducing their capability to process learning content. Therefore, learners’ emotion is also a critical factor affecting the quality of learning.