The Impacts of Digital Games on Learning Academic English: A Prior Knowledge Perspective

Abstract

In order to help learners improve the grammar concept of academic English, we developed an Academic English Competitive Solitaire Game (AECSG) where learners developed the understanding English academic writing via a problem-solving process. In addition, an empirical study was conduct to investigate how high prior knowledge (HPK)learners and low prior knowledge (LPK)learners reacted to the AECSG. The results indicated that HPK learners had better task scores and got fewer answer card errors in Task 1. Additionally, HPK learners favored to collect large-scaled information with the sentence hint so while LPK learners were keen to collect small-scaled information with the Chinese hint. On the other hand, no significant differences between HPK learners and LPK learners were found for the scores of Task 2. These finding suggested that practice could reduce the gap between LPK learners and HPK learners. In summary, the findings from this study contribute the understandings of how to develop personalized AECSG.