Utilizing M-Gamafied Platform for L2 English Pedagogy

With the advancements in new communication technologies, the authorities of Iranian educational ministry have emphasized opening a new perspective for teaching and learning with the application of new medium of mobile communication from the early childhood to attract the learners as well as to improve their main skills of learning. The current study was conducted to examine the effect of combining two main nonformal media of playing and mobile communication with face to face teaching for English learning. To that purpose, the performance of 270 Iranian students ranging from 12 to 17 with preintermediate proficiency level was traced to highlight their blended learning of new words while being provided with marginal introduction of the contents by digital games within three groups. As the face to face instruction was common to all the participants in the education context, the first group did the prefabricated games while the second and third ones did the native Iranian game of 'Xhane Bazi' both in real and virtual settings which were shifted occasionally for the purpose of English language instruction. The assessment of student's performance was not limited to mere reliance on the traditional methods of pretest. Instead, posttest and the formative assessment, survey, and summative assessment were also utilized. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of data revealed a meaningful effect of indigenous instructional games on learning English language. In a nutshell, the more participatory, diverse, indigenous and culture-based are instructional games, the better the learning of English as a foreign language through mobile phone will be. Thus, it can be concluded that learner's outperformance is related to the qualitative and quantitative amount of content as well as communications during accomplishing the game.