Pedagogic tasks in digital games: Effects of feedback conditions and individual characteristics on learning request-making

We investigated the extent to which English learners developed knowledge of pragmatically-appropriate request-making forms through task-based gameplay involving virtual dialogues with fictional professors, employers, and friends on a virtual US campus. The digital game presents players with several scenarios, asking them to select the most appropriate dialogue option given a situation presented in both text and video. Depending on their dialogue choice, one of three videos plays depicting an authentic reaction to the option selected (e.g. happily accepting the request; refusing the request with dismay). Undergraduate students at a Chinese university (n = 105) played the game involving 10 hypothetical request-making scenarios. Two versions of the game were developed. In one version, participants were only given one opportunity to watch a single reaction video while the second version allowed selection of multiple request forms and viewing multiple reaction videos. Regardless of the game version, participants improved their productive knowledge of request-making after playing the game and maintained knowledge at the delayed posttest, even though their receptive knowledge showed no improvement. Higher English proficiency had a positive impact on their immediate gains in productive knowledge, while motivation to learn English had a negative impact on receptive knowledge.