This exploratory study fills the gap in research on using print board games to teach English prosody to advanced EFL learners at university level. We developed three in-class print-and-play board games that accompanied three prosody-related topics in a course in English phonetics and phonology at a Polish university. For those topics, compared to topics without any board games, learners reported higher in-class engagement and obtained higher post-class quiz scores. At the end of the course, learners rated board games as equally or more useful than some of the other teaching aids. Although traditional printed worksheets were still rated as the most useful teaching aid, learners expressed their preference for using extra classroom time for playing board games instead of completing extra worksheet exercises. We hope these promising results will encourage teachers to experiment with implementing these and other board games in their advanced curricula.
The aim of this paper is to explore if English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' usage of an online workbook follows Benford's law, which predicts the frequency of leading digits in numbers describing natural phenomena. According to Benford (1938), one can predict the frequency distribution of leading digits in numbers describing natural datasets, e.g. river lengths. In such numbers, the digit 1 occurs most frequently, while the digit 9 occurs least-frequently. This counterintuitive phenomenon attracted the attention of researchers seeking inconsistencies in data, e.g. false tax claims (Miller, 2015). We show that the practical application of Benford's law could extend to detecting abnormal learner behaviour in online EFL products. First, we show that the distributions of leading digits of the number of online activities submitted by EFL learners on an e-learning platform and the time spent on those activities do indeed follow Benford's law. Then, we show that some learners whose behaviour does not conform to Benford's law show online behaviour that is abnormal relative to their peers-in particular, they submit many activities in a few days, which could suggest, for example, poor time management.
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