Collaborative Drama-based EFL Learning with Mobile Technology Support in Familiar Context

• Main Authors: Shih-Ying Tseng, 曾詩穎
• Other Authors: Wu-Yuin Hwang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/jp985f

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 104 === Contextual learning has been recognized as an important method for EFL learning. However, most contextual learning activities were pre-designed by teachers or researchers without much flexibility to allow learners to learn what they feel interested. Therefore, learner-centered contextual design for learning becomes vital since it can motivate learners to explore the contexts and apply what they learned into authentic contexts. Moreover, several researchers recently indicated that drama was a good activity for EFL learning because drama guided learners to interact with each other and using body language to express their ideas. In spite of the above mentioned advantages of drama and contextual learning, there is still no research focusing on using drama in authentic contexts to facility EFL learning with mobile devices. Therefore, we developed one contextual drama (CD) system in mobile devices to help students to learn English. Students can use the proposed CD system to prepare, make and conduct drama with voice, photos and texts in authentic contexts to improve English learning. This paper aimed to examine how our proposed CD system and collaborative contextual drama influenced students’ learning behaviors and achievement. After experiment, the results demonstrated that drama-based learning in authentic context could achieve better English speaking than traditional paper methods. Moreover, it was found that due to collaboration in drama-based EFL learning in authentic context could promote peer discussion and help, thereby significantly improving the abilities of describing a story by a picture and writing behaviors including sentence complexity and sentence pattern diversity. The further analysis by interview and observation also revealed that students’ body language and engagement in drama activities have significant influences on learning achievement.