I am currently (still!) analysing data collected during fieldwork for this research project. I now have renewed respect for those in the transcription business, and very much wishing I had been more organised during data collection. That would certainly help a lot now when I’m trudging through, categorising and clumping data (I’m sure there’s more technical terms!). A lot of methodology books and papers do say that “themes will emerge” and it has been the most gratifying (and relieving) feeling to see it finally happening.
One theme emerging is the idea of fun. The students talk about it, the teachers talk about it, and the literature… doesn’t talk about it (much). In fact, if you do a Google search (Scholar or not) on “fun” and “education” or “fun” and “learning,” most of the results are to do with computer games. Many others are to do with Physical Education. If you do a more refined search by learning area or discipline, you get articles related to “fun” in those areas (often because it’s in the title) but the overwhelming majority of scholarly works seem to be around games of both the virtual and physical nature. So what is meant by “fun,” then? What makes learning “fun” and why does it keep emerging in my research? And why didn’t I pick up on it sooner and ask better questions about it?
Alas, that’s the problem (beauty?) with waiting for themes to emerge rather than starting out with a testable hypothesis. It’s never straight-forward, and oft-times leaves the researcher with more questions than answers. Many of the interview questions I did ask invited participants to talk about what they “liked” or “enjoyed” in learning/teaching languages with ICTs and so it may not be surprising that “fun” came up a lot. But it came up in interesting ways. Teachers would use “fun” as a justification for a unit of work:
“It has, it has to hold some relevance to them. Why do I do festivals? Festivals because, you know, like it’s fun, it’s enjoyable stuff, it’s parades, it’s, you know, stuff that appeals to children.”
Or a reason for choosing one professional learning workshop over another:
“Penny: But you already know a lot about PowerPoint
Anna: Yeh I know, but like…
Penny: So why do you want to do more about PowerPoint?
Anna: Yeh but, these are like, but these are like computer games. I just thought, “Fun, computer games!” I, to be honest, I looked at voki.com and flickr.com and went, “What the hell is that?”"
But the students’ conceptualisation of “fun” was different. They didn’t equate “fun” with games, parades, and “appealing stuff” alone but rather that “fun” in class was due to variety and achieving the purpose of being there, i.e. learning the language:
“Crystal : And you don’t get stuck doing the same thing, which is like really boring after a while.
Kate: Yeh, you kind of get like a really big variety.
Penny: OK.
John: And it’s fun.
Penny: It’s fun. Yeh.
Jake: Yeh.
Kate: Yeh.
Penny: What makes it fun?
Crystal: Just learning.
Jake: Because um you learn different games and how to play. And, and it’s got language in it. We learn a different language.”
For the students interviewed, work was work. It didn’t really matter if it had flashy graphics or a cute cartoon character named Budi helping them along, it was still work. Some of the teacher participants, however, believed that the drill-based games such as the Language Market series or games on Languages Online were “fun” (which is why they used them), and I wonder what they based their evaluations on. These games have cutesey graphics, “motivating” sounds, and certainly “look like fun” but in my observations I noted that students were often clicking random objects and completing levels through guess-work (trial-and-error clicking) rather than actually engaging in the intended vocabulary practice and testing. Students rarely described these computer games as “fun” (although the physical games were certainly described as such!!) but rather described their enjoyment of more active tasks where they were required to produce something of their own (e.g. a video, a presentation) and interact with others. They enjoyed acting and interacting with heaps of variety – that’s what made learning “fun”.
Screen shot from The Language Market Stage A for Indonesian. http://www.thelanguagemarket.com/ This software was used by all Indonesian classes observed in this research project.
Back to the literature. What do others have to say about “fun”? Malone (1981), in his work on computer games and fun, tells us that attributes of challenge, fantasy and curiosity are key components of “fun” which in turn inform his theory of intrinsically motivating instruction. This work has been extended by other authors (Carroll 2004; Draper, 1999; MacFarlane et al., 2005), and attributes of immersion, reflection, play and flow, collaboration, learner control, curiosity, fantasy, and challenge have further been identified as key elements of “fun”. Going into these attributes is beyond the scope of this blog post (!) but I find it interesting to think about these attributes in relation to what I have observed in classrooms, what teachers and students have told me in interviews, and what they describe as “fun” and why. There certainly seems to be a divide between what the teachers percieve to be fun, and what the students do. Draper’s (1999) work in which he analyses fun as a candidate software requirement is interesting to reflect on given this:
“If you ask adult learners whether their educational learning is fun, they often hesitate, and hesitate more than if you ask whether they are enjoying it. This is because it involves more effort than most things described as “fun”, but also can be more deeply satisfying because it can engage much deeper goals. It is this deeper engagement we should be aiming for where possible” (p. 121).
And it is that deeper engagement that the students craved. Indeed, thinking about what my teacher participants said, perhaps there isn’t really a divide. They certainly craved it as well. When the teachers described for me what good learning with ICTs looks like/sounds like/feels like, it was all about that sense of engagement. It was not necessarily about “fun,” although they often talked about “fun” in relation to a rationale on using ICT in the first place.
So, what is “fun”? What makes language learning “fun”? Or should we be asking a different question? What makes language learning (with or without ICTs) immersive, reflective, playful, flowing, collaborative, personalised, curious, fantastic, and challenging? I’m going to follow the advice of some of my student participants in thinking about all of this, and “just have fun with it.”
Hear for yourself: