Impacts of Mobile-Game-Based Collaborative Prewriting on EFL Students’ Individual Writing in Student-Centered Class Context

Abstract

To motivate learners to engage in writing courses and help to improve their writing performance, a mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach was proposed in this study. A quasi-experiment was implemented by recruiting two classes of non-English major students from a university in northeastern China. Class 1 learned to write under the guidance of the mobile-gamebased collaborative prewriting method, while Class 2 in the conventional teacher-centered approach. Their writing performance was measured to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. By analyzing the scores of students' writings in pre-test and post-test and the content of student discussions in prewriting activities, it was found that, the students in Class 1 who focused on content talk in group discussions improved more in organization of content, originality, fluency, and elaboration than those in Class 2 in post test. In addition, the findings showed that the incidence of different types of idea units in collaborative prewriting discussions had significant correlation with the ratings of different dimensions, respectively, in individual writings. Furthermore, the majority of volunteer students who finished the questionnaire endorsed the mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach.

'Technology saves us?’ Malaysian lecturers’ beliefs and readiness towards the application of technology-assisted student-centered learning

“…Similarly, Sarvary et al (2022) found that online learning through technological devices and in-person courses provide opportunities for improving studentcentered Biology laboratory instruction. Moreover, Turdieva and Olimov (2021) and Wang and Song (2022) disclosed that games technology is an innovative type of studentcentered learning, and provided significant contribution in developing students' autonomous learning. From these previous studies we are well informed that technology possesses crucial role in fostering student-centered learning in various contexts of education.…”