Research Question Three: What are the young learners’ perceptions of acquiring

Positive feedback toward acquiring English vocabulary through playing games

was shown from the students’ response in the questionnaire. Seventy-two percent of

the participants agreed that the design of the game successfully sustained their interests

and motivation. This number indicated that the game genre, Adventure Game, and the

game platform, Facebook, were able to maintain young learners’ motivation and

increase their chances of learning. This outcome tallies with the results in the former

studies (Baltra, 1990; Bosch, 2009; Chen & Yang, 2012; Culley et al.,1986; Kanuka

&Garrison, 2004; Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2004). As proposed by Culley et al (1986)

that in order to complete the tasks or explore the adventure game environment, players

would be urged to figure out the meanings of certain unknown words. The majority of

the participants in this study also reported that the process of the game made them feel

like knowing more new words. With the coherent response, it can be inferred that this

adventure game served as an attractive and competent material for incidental English

vocabulary learning.

In addition to the game genre and platform, according to the results of the

questionnaire, both repeated encounters and picture glosses were considered great aids

to trigger young learners’ curiosity for new vocabulary items. Nine out of ten students

said that they tended to guess the word meaning when the word appeared with a

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picture or showed up repeatedly in the game, which conforms to the former studies

that these two elements play an important role in incidental vocabulary acquisition

(Chun & Plass, 1996; Jenkins et al.,1984; Kost et al., 1999; Saragi et al.,1978).

Although the test results in this study were not completely consistent with the

participants’ self-report in the questionnaire, the importance of the two factors should

not be underestimated.

As for the participants’ perceptions of the game learning effect, four fifths of the

participants agreed that playing this Facebook game helped them learn English

vocabulary items. This idea may result from the outcome of the vocabulary immediate

posttest. After the students finished the test, they probably found out the fact that they

were able to recognize more words in the test items because of the help from the game

session and thus realized the learning effect of this adventure game.

To be more specific about what elements of the game led to the retention progress,

more than two thirds of the participants believed that picture glosses and repeated

encounters of new words were the factors that help improve their vocabulary retention.

However, according to the data analysis, vocabulary retention rate was not

significantly affected by picture glosses or repeated exposure of new words. The fact

that students’ answer for this question does not correspond to their test results may be

due to the insufficient samples (N=32). Test results are easily influenced by outliers in

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the group with a small sample size. Secondly, students may also be indirectly guided

by the statements in the questionnaire. Since the two elements, picture glosses and

repeated encounters of words, kept appearing in different questions, students might

subconsciously think they were important items and thus chose them without a second

thought.

Other than picture glosses and repeated exposure of vocabulary items, about half

of the participants also stated that “contexts” of the words helped them with

vocabulary retention even though this factor had not been emphasized in the

questionnaire. This result indicated that contexts of the words might have some impact

on vocabulary acquisition for these young learners. One phenomenon worth

mentioning is that no participants gave any feedback when asked to deliver other

factors by themselves. It may imply that students at this age still need guidance when

doing questionnaires like this.

When asked about the advantages of learning with games, many of the

participants’ answers were that it was stress free. Young learners in junior high school

often relate every learning activity to stressful hard work. From their response to this

question, it could be inferred that learning activities with less pressure would

encourage more students to join. Correspondent to what Freiermuth (2002) proposed,

games were able to diminish the affective barrier for the absence of face-to-face

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communication, the present study once again proved that game-based learning can

offer a less-stress learning environment. Another popular answer for advantages was

that vocabulary retention became easier through the game, which is consistent with

Chen and Yang’s study in 2012. Along with the advantages proposed in the former

studies, including a storyline, different characters, interesting tasks, level upgrading

system, and most importantly learners’ enthusiasm, this Facebook adventure game

seemed to successfully transform vocabulary learning from a dull and difficult job to a

simple and interesting task that many of the participants enjoyed very much.

According to Chen and Yang (2012), adventure games were capable of enhancing

vocabulary acquisition for college students, the results in the present study verified that

it was also the case for young learners in junior high school.

Few participants mentioned the disadvantages of learning by games since most of

them appreciated the process very much. However, what they did bring out in the

questionnaires are the most common shortcomings often discussed in the field of

incidental vocabulary learning, time consuming and the guessing effect. These two

drawbacks appear to be inevitable weaknesses of almost every kind of incidental

learning activity and the present study is not the exception.

As for the difficulties the participants ran into in the game process, half of the

participants complained that there were too many unknown words in the game, which

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made them stuck in the game and lose the patience. This problem could result from the

theme of the game. Since this game was about a rescue mission in a deserted estate and

most of the characters were ghosts or spirits, students might have a hard time reading

words that seldom appeared in their daily lives, such as mausoleum or voodoo charm.

Originally, the researcher predicted that the pictures next to the words or the contexts

of the words would help the learners understand the word meanings. From this

response, perhaps the pictures and the contexts in the game were not precise enough to

understand or the participants needed more help besides picture glosses.

Although too many unknown words bothered many of the participants, in general,

they still loved this way of acquiring English words. Only three participants would not

keep learning through games, and the rest of them all enjoyed it and wanted to

maintain this learning method. The interesting part is that although the participants

were already aware of the learning effects of games, for nearly half of them, the

purpose to play the game in the future was for the pleasure they would obtain in the

game process instead of the additional linguistic knowledge they might gain. From this

response, it can be inferred that many young learners were still resistant to any

activities related to English learning, but they did not reject the chance to play an

English video game, which gave educators a great opportunity to disguise the effective

English learning activity with a desirable video game.

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