Thinking through gaming : applying concept-based instruction for French pronominal verbs to Japanese university students
(2025)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- François, Thomas
- Abstract
- The present work attempts to introduce mobile-assisted language learning in the acquisition of French pronominal verbs for Japanese university students. Pronominal verbs are known as an heterogeneous category of verbs hampered by inconsistent teaching approaches and fragmentary descriptions of their uses. These difficulties are further increased when learners' first language lacks a corresponding structure. Japanese learners of French, in particular, are known to struggle with the acquisition of this grammatical concept, resulting in poor understanding and/or mastery of pronominal verbs up to upper-intermediate linguistic levels. To compensate for these difficulties, the effects of two methodologies will be compared along with a control group. The first approach, inspired by the socioconstructivist theory of Concept-based Instruction, aims at depicting the target concept in a thorough fashion and promote its acquisition through verbalisations in learners' first language. The second approach, stemming from Communicative Language Teaching and Task-based Language Teaching, seeks to enhance conceptual understanding with contextualised output sequences and a non-linear learning structure. Both approaches were integrated into mobile games so as to incentive learners' autonomy and implication, especially when considering the Japanese mobile game market. After being tested in a pilot experiment in October 2023, the games were used by 94 learners from 5 Japanese universities in May-June 2024. Each experiment was preceded by a pre-test and concluded with a post-test after a 3-week period during which players were free to play their assigned game at will. The results of the study, as demonstrated by both statistical and qualitative analyses, show that not only did each game contribute to significant improvements regarding the understanding of pronominalisation relative to task investment, they also brought different effects depending on test items. The success of the experiments calls for the implementation of mixed approaches in mobile-assisted language learning, taking the assets of both CBI and TBLT into powerful instruction tools for grammar acquisition.
- Affiliations
Citations
Zakhia Doueihi, J. (2025). Thinking through gaming : applying concept-based instruction for French pronominal verbs to Japanese university students. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/242572