| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺中教育大學 === 教師專業碩士學位學程 === 106 === This study is based on nonequivalent pretest-posttest control group design of quasi-experimental research, and the qualitative questionnaires are also used to find out students’ attitudes of adopting board games in English learning. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of applying board games to the ice-breaking activity in a 5th-grade English class to reduce students’ anxieties.The researcher combined popular board games-Halli Galli and Alles Tomate-with English words and sentences chosen from an English textbook published by Kang Hsuan. Students play these modified board games for five minutes as an ice-breaker at the beginning of every English class.
Forty-eight 5th-grade students from two different classes participated in the study. One class was randomly selected as experimental group, and the other was the control group. This study lasted for ten weeks, and two teaching hours per week were used to implement this ice-breaking activity. Applying board games to ice-breaking activity of English teaching were conducted in the experimental group. The researcher adopted board games published by Swan Panasia as the experimental activity, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scales developed by Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope （1986）as the instrument to evaluate changes of students’ anxieties, and Learning Feedback Questionnaires as the instrument to collect qualitative data. The quantitative data were analyzed by t-test（Independent-Samples and Paired-Sample）, and descriptive statistics, while the qualitative by coding and categorization.
The research findings are listed as follows：
1.The effects of integrating board games to ice-breaking activity
(1).The ice-breaking activity of integrating board games in English teaching did not effectively reduce fifth-graders’ foreign language anxiety.
(2).There are no significant differences between the experimental group and the control group in terms of reducing foreign language anxiety.
2.The responses from experimental group
(1).Board games do not significantly reduce learners’ foreign language anxiety in every aspect because of the complex construct of anxiety, such as fears of receiving negative feedback from others as well as the test anxiety.
(2).Integrating board games to ice-breaking activity is not the only way to maintain student’s foreign language anxiety low.
3.Problems and strategies
(1).Good class management can help to reduce students’ foreign language anxiety in more aspects including the fears of receiving negative feedback and test anxiety.
(2).Paying attention to the channels that students’ learn English is more important than keep employing new teaching tools.
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