Impacts of Concept Map-Based Collaborative Mobile Gaming on English Grammar Learning Performance and Behaviors

EFL (English as a foreign language) students usually learn by rote when they study English grammar. They usually memorize all the grammar rules mechanically instead of learning grammar in a structured way. Researchers have suggested that students can internalize knowledge via using knowledge construction tools and collaborated learning activities. Therefore, in this study, a grammar concept mapping-based collaborative English mobile gaming approach has been developed. A quasi-experiment on an English course was carried out in an elementary school to evaluate the learning achievement of the low- and high-achieving students. Moreover, the students' learning behavioral patterns were explored by analyzing their interactive logs in the mobile discussion forum. The results showed that the students using the proposed approach revealed significantly higher English grammar achievements than those who learned with the collaborative English gaming approach; moreover, the grammar concept mapping strategy can help the low-achieving students to have better learning achievements, and to realize the concept structure of English grammar to internalize their knowledge. In addition, it was also found that the low-achieving students had significantly higher mental load than the high-achieving students, implying that the use of the grammar concept mapping approach provided a challenging but helpful task to help the low achievers focus on the gaming process and successfully organize the grammar structures they had learned.