Board games for teaching English prosody to advanced EFL learners

Abstract

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.

Board Games in Improving Pupils’ Speaking Skills: A Systematic Review

“…Board games lowered their speaking anxiety and provided a game-like atmosphere which enabled them to express their ideas freely within the context provided. Similar findings were depicted in the studies of Łodzikowski & Jekiel [37] and Gonzalo-Iglesia et al [28]. The former delineated board games as alternatives that promoted active participation in a speaking lessons, while the latter portrayed board games as activating catalysts that motivated pupils to speak in the classroom.…”

“…Pupils' learning attitude was recorded as the highest among these three aspects. Thirteen papers reported that pupils agreed that board games increased their motivation in speaking lessons [21,23,28,33,34,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. In eight studies, pupils revealed that their speaking competence improved [23,26,32,34,35,37,41,42].…”

“…Thirteen papers reported that pupils agreed that board games increased their motivation in speaking lessons [21,23,28,33,34,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. In eight studies, pupils revealed that their speaking competence improved [23,26,32,34,35,37,41,42]. Lastly, six studies identified that pupils proclaimed that board games enhanced their learning community development [21,[26][27][28][29]39].…”

“…Apart from the change in learning attitude, there was a shift in pupils' speaking competence in terms of grammar, pronunciation and fluency [23,26,27,32,34,35,37,41,42]. Pupils claimed that board and dice games enabled them to learn how to use tenses, passive voice and conditional sentences in their speech [23].…”

Examining Board Gameplay and Learning: A Multidisciplinary Review of Recent Research

“…Language, culture, and history learning. Łodzikowski and Jekiel (2019) studied the influence of board gameplay on English prosody among university students, learners of English as a foreign language in Poland. Three games focusing on crucial prosody topics were designed, and gameplay resulted in a moderate increase in students' postgame class exam, higher engagement in class, and preference for board games as an alternative to the traditional in-class worksheets (Łodzikowski & Jekiel, 2019).…”