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2 0 1 4 C A L L C O N F E R E N C E

R E S E A R C H C H A L L E N G E S I N C A L L

P R O C E E D I N G S

U N I V E R S I T Y O F A N T W E R P 0 7 – 0 9 J U L Y 2 0 1 4

Edited by Jozef Colpaert, Ann Aerts & Margret Oberhofer

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Jozef Colpaert, Ann Aerts, Margret Oberhofer (editors)

Research Challenges in CALL, Proceedings CALL 2014, Antwerp, University of Antwerp

ISBN 9789057284533

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Uitgave en verspreiding:

LINGUAPOLIS

Universiteit Antwerpen

Prinsstraat 13

2000 Antwerpen

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Table of contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................... 3

ORGANIZATION ................................................................................................................ 9

INVITED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS ........................................................................................... 11

Piet Desmet .................................................................................................................................................... 12 The Siren CALL of Technology. Back to Pedagogical Basics! ............................................................................. 12

Bryan Smith.................................................................................................................................................... 13 Research Challenges in CALL: Musings of a Challenged CALL Researcher ........................................................ 13

SELECTED PLENARIES ...................................................................................................... 15

Geoff Lawrence .............................................................................................................................................. 16 The ‘Visioning’ Dilemma in Exploratory CALL Research .................................................................................... 16

Huifen Lin ....................................................................................................................................................... 20 Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) in L2 Oral Proficiency Development: A Meta-analysis ............... 20

Virginia Westwood ......................................................................................................................................... 22 Using Design-Based Research for Qualitative Investigation of CALL in an Oral Indigenous Language ............. 22

PAPER PRESENTATIONS .................................................................................................. 33

Pineteh E. Angu .............................................................................................................................................. 34 From Brick Walls to Virtual Space: Using a Computer-Assisted Programme to Enhance the Language and Communication Skills of Information Technology Students. ............................................................................ 34

Ghada Awada, Abir Abdallah ......................................................................................................................... 40 English for Lawyers Weblog: Using Weblogs to Promote Legal English in the Classroom ................................ 40

Ghada Awada, Abir Abdallah ......................................................................................................................... 45 The Extent of Efficiency of Legal Videos in Enhancing the Writing Skills and Vocabulary Acquisition of Lawyers in a Legal English Class ...................................................................................................................................... 45

Ghada Awada, Abir Abdallah ......................................................................................................................... 52 The Use of the Webquest as a Technological Tool in Public Schools ................................................................ 52

Anke Berns, Manuel Palomo Duarte, Juan Manuel Dodero, Manuel Pérez-Zurera ......................................... 60 Mobile Apps and Games to Foster Students’ Writing Competences ................................................................ 60

Françoise Blin, Nicolas Guichon, Sylvie Thouësny, Ciara Wigham ................................................................... 68 Creating and Sharing a Language Learning and Teaching Corpus of Multimodal Interactions: Ethical Challenges and Methodological Implications ................................................................................................... 68

Kris Buyse ....................................................................................................................................................... 70 ICT and the Six Experts in Writing Assistance: Objectives and Effectiveness of some Recent ICT-Experts in Language Learning ............................................................................................................................................ 70

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Anke Berns, Manuel Palomo Duarte, Juan Manuel Dodero, Manuel

Pérez-Zurera

University of Cádiz, Cádiz, Spain

anke.berns@uca.es, manuel.palomo@uca.es, juan.manuel@uca.es,

manuel.zurera@alum.uca.es

Mobile Apps and Games to Foster Students’ Writing Competences

Bio data

Anke Berns is currently working as a German Lecturer in the English and French

Department at the University of Cádiz (Spain) where she received her Ph.D. in German

as a Foreign Language in 2002. She has been working for more than 18 years as a

teacher and teacher trainer. Her research interests focus specifically on the design of

motivating and innovative teaching and learning materials in the Area of Foreign

Language Learning, a field in which she has published several books and made

contributions to peer-reviewed journals as well as international research conferences.

Manuel Palomo-Duarte has a Computer Science degree from the University of Seville

and a Ph.D. from the University of Cadiz. He is currently a lecturer and Degree

Coordinator for Computer Science at the University of Cádiz (Spain). His teaching focuses

on subjects related to web science and serious games using open-source software. His

main research interests are learning technologies and collaborative development, fields in

which he has contributed to various peer-reviewed journals and research conferences.

Juan-Manuel Dodero has a CS degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and a

Computer Science Ph.D. from the Carlos III University of Madrid. He is currently an

Associate Professor of the University of Cádiz (Spain). He has also been a lecturer of the

Carlos III University of Madrid and worked as a R&D engineer for Intelligent Software

Components S.A. His main research interests are Web science and engineering and

technology-enhanced learning, fields in which he has co-authored numerous articles in

journals and contributed to research conferences.

Manuel Pérez-Zurera is in the final year of his Computer Science Degree at the

University of Cadiz (Spain). He is interested in mobile applications, video-games and

programming and has recently designed several mini-games to be included in a mobile

app for German language learners.

Abstract

The steady rise and increasing availability of new technologies, especially in the area of

MALL, has created new challenges in the Area of Foreign Language Learning. This means

that, since students have more and more access to a wide range of devices and learning

materials, teachers are challenged to explore the potential and the benefits of these

technologies to enhance students’ learning processes.

In recent years there have been several attempts to integrate devices such as mobile

phones as valid learning tools to support formal as well as informal learning (Thornton &

Houser 2005; Levy & Kennedy 2005; Godwin-Jones 2011; Holden & Sykes 2011;

Stockwell 2013).

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Nonetheless, most of these attempts have been focused on providing learners with

meaningful language input rather than on enhancing students’ active use of the target

language. The present study therefore aims to explore some of the possibilities in using

mobile phones for providing learners with meaningful language input as well as for

pushing them towards increased language output. For this purpose we have designed a

gamificated Android App which can be played either on a smartphone or tablet. The app

itself provides learners, through several mini-games, with opportunities to first acquire

new vocabulary input and then to practice the newly acquired vocabulary in a

collaborative murder game, called Catch me, if you can. In order to successfully complete

the different game tasks that are randomly assigned by the server, students need to

collaborate with other game-players and develop real-world communication skills.

Additionally, students’ communication is coordinated and stored by a game server that

allows us to analyze students’ behaviour and interaction during the different game

sessions.

Short paper

Introduction

Although almost every foreign language teacher agrees on the importance of providing

students with versatile and meaningful language input as well as opportunities for

producing language output, students often lack language practice in and outside the

classroom. Amongst some of the most common reasons are that language courses are

often too large, in terms of participants, and too short in terms of course hours. This

makes it not only extremely difficult to provide learners with enough language input and

practice within the classroom, but also to focus on learners’ particular needs. In recent

years many teachers and institutions have started integrating in their course syllabus

blended teaching practices thus providing students with additional learning tools beyond

the classroom. Highly interactive tools such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLE),

wikis, videoconferencing, virtual worlds, and so on, were for many years amongst the

most popular tools since they enabled students and teachers to access learning materials

anytime and anywhere. Furthermore interaction between learners and teachers is no

longer restricted to the classroom but goes beyond it. The increasing availability of

ubiquitous mobile technologies such as smartphones or tablets which provide

multimodality tools including audio, video and text-chat hold –in our opinion- further

potential to support students’ language learning in and beyond the classroom. This,

coupled with the fact that mobile data connection has become more affordable allows for

distributed and asynchronous learning with fewer restrictions. The purpose of the present

study is therefore to explore some of the possibilities of integrating smartphones in

blended teaching practices so as to provide learners with meaningful language input as

well as opportunities for using the target language as often as possible in real-world

communication. Although virtual worlds have proven to be an interesting approach

(Berns et al, 2013; Garrido & Rodríguez, 2013), they usually need a powerful server to

run them and PCs on which to play them. Therefore we proposed using a simple chat

server and light app for widely-spread Android devices. In the following we will offer

some insight into the architecture of a gamificated App we have designed for a group of

A1 level students of a German Foreign Language course.

Method Game-design

The app we have designed consists of two parts. The first part has three levels, each one

offering 3 mini-games that can be played offline. The second one is a collaborative

murder game (4th level), called Catch me, if you can! Whilst the mini-games aim to

provide learners with new vocabulary input and are being played individually, the

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collaborative murder game aims to provide learners with opportunities to apply the

previously acquired vocabulary in real-world interaction with peers.

This means that in order to complete the game task successfully players need to

communicate and negotiate in the target language by using the text-chat for gathering

and exchanging information with other game-players. This 4th level can only be played

online, and needs a server properly be configured to accept connections from the

students’ apps. In the following we will offer a short description of each game-level, its

topics, goals as well as the language competences which are being trained (see Table 1).

Table 1: Game-levels

Test design

As can be seen from the table above each level focuses on different topics, game tasks

and language competences. The latter include mainly listening, reading and writing.

Additionally and in order to guide students during their learning process the game

features different kinds of feedback information. This is delivered either by instant

feedback on players’ task performance (correct/ incorrect) (see Figure 1) or by more

detailed feedback at the end of each game-task (see Figure 2, where a student receives

a report on his wrong answers).

Figure 1: Instant feedback Figure 2: Explicit and more detailed feedback

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More detailed feedback is delivered especially in those cases where game-tasks are more

complex and players are asked to write in the target language.

In this case feedback is delivered by the system and indicates to each player, both the

mistakes committed by him/her as well as the possible answers required to complete the

game-task successfully.

Furthermore by integrating a time-limit and an additional score-system we aimed to

make the game not only more engaging and challenging but also more effective in terms

of learning outcomes. Thus students were not allowed to pass to the next game-task

until they achieved at least 90% of the total game scores.

Game-design: Catch me, if you can!

During the collaborative game students have to play in small teams in order to identify

and catch a serial killer who is going to commit another crime. The game requires at

least one group of players and has no limitation on the number of groups that can play in

parallel (the server concurrent connection capacity being the only limiting factor). The

more players participate in the game the more challenging and competitive it becomes.

First, the supervisor uploads to the server a file indicating the groups of students who will

play. Each player is assigned a role (each group has one detective and one or two

policemen) and game-task: whilst the detective is given the task to coordinate the

investigation providing his/her policemen with relevant hints on how and where to find

witnesses of previous crimes (hints are sent from the game server), the policemen are

asked firstly to identify the witnesses and then, to share the gathered information via

text-chat with their respective teams. During the entire game players’ identities are

hidden so that none of them know who are their teammates. Additionally by providing a

text-chat function within the App, we prevented learners from using alternative

communication channels to communicate amongst each other. Students were

encouraged to use solely the target language as their chat conversations would be

assessed later on by the lecturer.

Figure 3: Q-R Code and screenshot of a video-clip

The game is based on finding witnesses to identify the murderer. For this purpose our

App includes several virtual witnesses which provide some key-information through short

video clips. Witnesses are located in different places that are activated by loading QR

codes (see Figure 3). Hence, before playing the game, the supervisor has to place the

QR codes provided by the App in suitable locations so that students have to move

through the playfield to complete the task. QR codes could be printed on papers or

sticker boards, for example, and their positions could be described. For example, the QR

code for the witness in the bar could be placed in the cafeteria of the Faculty, and that of

the garage in the entrance to a parking lot. When the game starts, the detective receives

key-information that he/she has to communicate to the policemen using the text-chat

function. The policemen then have to go to the indicated locations and scan the QR-codes

in order to get the clue. When clues are sent back to the detective, they are entered in

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his/her App (which includes, unlike the app of the policemen, a notepad). If the clue is

correct, the players of each team are notified and a new task is issued.

The game which we have designed for the present study contains a total of 24 different

clues which refer to two murders. Clues are being displayed randomly so that players can

repeat the game several times by facing each time a new challenge.

Furthermore the App has been designed in such a way that the supervisor can easily

modify and/or increase the number of clues and murders, if desired.

Software architecture

We considered different software architecture designs and ended up with using a client-

server approach. This way, we reduced the workload on the devices used by the students

(as they could run out of battery) and we created a centralized point to monitor the

game development while keeping a log of students’ interaction. We implemented client

software for Android devices using Java programming language. The Android community

is the largest at the moment, and devices are affordable while development is easy using

open-source tools. As for the server, it is an Open Fire chat server that uses XMPP

communication protocol to interact with clients. Once the nickname and password of the

player are entered, the app connects to the server to register in a chat room. When all

the team members are connected, the App starts the game (see Figure 4 for the

architecture diagram). Furthermore, the application is available as open-source software,

and is language-independent. So it can be easily adopted for other languages other than

German.

Figure 4: Architecture diagram

The experience

Participants

In order to evaluate and fine-tune the design of our gamificated app and to guarantee

that it meets our target-student needs, we played the App with 14 students who

voluntarily participated in an acceptance and usability test of the first stable version of

the system. The study was carried out in two sessions: one session in which students

individually played levels 1 to 3 of the App to familiarize them with the game, its

mechanism and vocabulary and a second session, in which students had to showcase the

previously acquired vocabulary knowledge by performing the collaborative online-game

(level 4). Results

The results of the game-experience were in general very positive as students got very

enthusiastic about the game and the idea of learning German through gamificated apps.

Nonetheless, there were some problems caused by external factors such as the data

connection of one of the two academic institutions we tested the game at. We used a

server in a cloud hosting service, so students needed Internet access to play the 4th

level of the game. Internet wireless access was limited by the fire-wall of the institution

itself (in particular, the 7222 Internet port used for Open Fire communications). As a

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result, some students could not activate the chat-room needed to participate in the

collaborative murder-game.

In contrast all students were able to enroll in the first part of the game and thus to test

levels 1 to 3.

More than half of the participating learners were able to fulfill the 9 mini-games

successfully in only one game-session, which lasted around 90 minutes. The remaining

students played at least 8 of the mini-games successfully.

Only one of the participating students could not pass level 3 since it took him the entire

game session of 90 minutes to complete level 1 and 2. However, in general students got

very quickly through part 1 and 2 of each game level, as these were based on simple

tasks such as matching photos with their corresponding audio-files or texts. In contrast

learners took much longer to complete part 3 of each game-level since this requires them

to focus on their writing. Nonetheless, as foreign language students usually have more

difficulties with speaking and writing than with reading and listening, they considered

part 3 not only the most challenging, but also the most useful part of the mini-games, as

they felt obliged to focus more on their writing.

Survey

Once students had finished participating in the game we asked them to report their

game-experience by describing their feelings and difficulties they had when using the

App. Students’ feedback was vital for improving the App-design and making it more user-

friendly and efficient. Amongst the feedback and suggestions we received from the

players these were the most common:

Some students reported problems related to their personal keypad which did not allow

them to use German vowel mutation such as “ä”, ö” and “ü” and thus to fulfill some of

the written game-tasks successfully. This can be easily solved by installing one of the

many freely available multi-language extensions for the Android smartphone keyboard.

From this we can conclude that students have never used their smartphones to

communicate in German, this game being their first time. Other students reported

problems when using the wireless connection at their university or school. Problems were

reported especially by school students since access to the internet is usually restricted at

schools in order to prevent students from accessing social-networks (Facebook, twitter)

or chat-rooms (whatsApp) during school time.

Conclusion

Traditional foreign language learning processes have proven to have had limited success,

especially when the number of students increases. They usually fail because there either

is a lack of time for students to interact and practice language sufficiently or else they

suffer from scalability issues (that is, they are difficult to implement with a large number

of students). Hence our proposal focuses on using computer systems to control students’

interaction. As a contrast to virtual worlds, which usually need a powerful server to run

and Pcs on which to be played, we proposed using Apps for smart phones. They need a

simple server software and light App for widely-spread Android devices. The App has two

parts. The first one can be played individually and offline. It comprises different tests that

enhance the vocabulary needed to play the second part.

The second part of the game has to be played online and in teams (2 or 3 persons),

teammates being assigned different roles. By using anonymity students are obliged to

collaborate in order to catch a serial killer by scanning QR codes. The game imposes no

restrictions on the number of teams playing in parallel (the server concurrent connection

capacity being the only limiting factor). At the end of the game, the supervisor receives a

log for each team. It contains all the messages sent through the chat, so it can be used

for assessment and language improvement processes. Even though the designed App

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needs to be tested with a much larger sample size in order to find objective evidence of

its usability and potential for enhancing foreign language learning in- and outside the

classroom, the current experience sheds some light on the possibilities of using mobile

Apps in the area of education and foreign language learning.

By providing multimodality tools including audio, video and text-chat, mobile Apps offer a

wide range of attractive learning approaches which can be applied in formal as well as

informal learning settings.

Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by the Andalusian Government under the ASCETA (Ref. P09-

TIC-5230, PAIDI programme) R&D project and the Tecnologías móviles para el

aprendizaje ubicuo de alemán (PI_14_104) project of University of Cadiz programme for

Researching and Innovation in Education. And by European Union under the

OpenDiscoverySpace: A socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to

boost the adoption of eLearning resources (CIP-ICT-PSP-2011-5) project. We would also

like to thank David Romero Santos and the Free/Libre Software and Open Knowledge

Office at UCA (OSLUCA) as well as Mar Dodero and Cristina Ortega (I.E.S. Poeta García

Gutiérrez, Chiclana) for their support during the project development.

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