Reducing Student’s English Dialogue Anxiety in Online Learning through Board Game

Abstract

The COVID 19 has been going on since April 2020 in Indonesia. It has resulted in the Indonesian government, especially the Ministry of Education and Culture, taking preventive steps to minimize contracting the virus. One of them is using online learning for students to go to school. However, there are challenges for teachers and students while learning in an online class, such as students who are often absent, students will quickly feel bored, students tend to be passive in the learning process, students do not master the learning material, and much more. It also happens in an English lesson, especially a dialogue activity. This research aims to prove whether using a board game can be effective media to reduce students’ language anxiety level or not during English learning in an online classroom. The kind of board game is the combination between snake and ladder and candy land, or it has been modified based on learning purpose. The research design used in this research is a quasi-trial non-equivalent control group design. The samples of this research are 60 ninth grades of junior high school students which are divided into the trial and control group. Data analyses used in this research are using SPSS mean score, data deviation, while hypothesis testing used in this research is the Mann-Whitney test. The result showed that a board game can reduce students’ anxiety levels. The data showed that the mean score of students after implementing board game reduces by 2.90 points, while the standard deviation increases by 2.901 points. From the Mann-Whitney test, it is known that Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) is 0.003 or < 0.05 which shows that H0 is rejected, and H1 is accepted. From the data analysis, it can be shown that the board game is effective media to reduce students’ language anxiety in dialogue activity during learning in an online class. Keywords: board game, language anxiety, online learning

Assessment of anxiety markers in schoolchildren in a distance learning environment

“…The experiment showed that it was found that the proposed anxiety coping strategies, such as differentiating, proficiency level, and individualized approaches to learning, lead to a decrease in anxiety and an increase in academic performance. The relationship between decreased anxiety and increased achievement found during the experiment echoes the findings of other empirical studies [6], [11], [25]. The researchers established a link between task simplification and high verbal association learning outcomes in anxious children.…”

“…These works emphasize that anxiety in online learning has its unique features associated with several common fears: i) Technology fear (worry about hardware malfunction, connection breakdown, or software disruption); ii) Uncertainty about one's digital literacy and related competencies; iii) Lack of personal connection with other students and with the teacher; and iv) Distractions by electronic entertainment. A few researchers had suggested using gaming content and learning approaches to engage student attention in remote learning environments, which proved to be successful [23], [25].…”

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

“…Furthermore, through board games, pupils were able to speak fluently [15,17,31,43,[46][47][48]52] and make less grammatical errors in their speech [15,17,43,44,[47][48][49]52,54,56]. In addition to this, board games exposed pupils to a myriad of speaking opportunities in different speaking contexts [7,45,46,51,53,54] and motivated pupils to speak [7,17,46,48,50,51,53,56].…”

“…Board games were regarded as tools that exposed pupils to various chances to practice speaking the target language naturally. Pupils were connected to real-life situations that provided meaningful learning opportunities through board games [45,53], thus stimulating them to develop their creativity and thinking into a wider area [46]. Pictures and words provided on the cards in board games enabled pupils to develop ideas for their speech content and pupils gained experience using the language naturally for their daily communication [7].…”

Students’ Speaking Activity on Zoom Application: A Need Analysis

“…Also, Nuzulia and Catur. K [13] added that games could be applied in online learning and gave significant effect to lessen students' anxiety in speaking performance. This implies how principle is speaking activity.…”