The Summary Journal 14

Motivational Elements of Digital Instructional Games: A Study of Young L2 Learners’ Game Designs

Language Teaching Research 1–16, 2016

By Yuko Goto Butler

University of Pennsylvania, USA

Despite the fact that the number of young second language (L2) learners (up to 12 years old) is growing worldwide, previous studies on task-based language instruction have not given these learners much attention, and it is often reported that young L2 learners tend to lose their motivation for language learning by sometime around the end of primary school (e.g. Carreira, 2006; Lopriore & Mihaljević Djigunović, 2011). This might be partially due to that fact that existing instructional material and tasks designed for young learners ‘often fail to cater to the genuine interests of children and to invoke intrinsic motivation for learning’ (Prosic-Santovac, 2016, p. 1). As young learners engage in playing computer games intensively (Gee, 2007; Prensky, 2001), however, these games are promising sources of information on their interests and factors that intrinsically motivate them.

The aim of the study is to identify motivational task elements based on what children respond to positively in games and incorporate into their own L2 vocabulary learning game designs. Eighty-two sixth-grade students (ages 11–12 years) in Japan were first asked to identify game elements by examining existing games and then to design games incorporating DIG tasks of their own and peer-evaluate them. Building on previous work (Butler, 2015), the study uses a mixed-methods approach to examine how both task-intrinsic characteristics and implementation conditions were realized in innovative and engaging DIG tasks by children.

The results of the study suggest that learners’ affective engagement in tasks may depend on both task implementation conditions as well as task-intrinsic characteristics. Some of the elements identified related to task implementation conditions (e.g. self-control functions, instant feedback, repetition) while others (e.g. challenge, fantasy) related to task-intrinsic characteristics. Skehan (2016) makes a clear distinction between task characteristics (e.g. number of elements in tasks) and task conditions (e.g. planning and repetition) and argues that the later may have a more promising relationship to learning on tasks. The present study suggests that it may be worth investigating if the same argument can be made when it comes to the effect of these factors on learners’ task motivation.