Research Of Pupils’ Oral English Learning Game Design

With the rapid development of Internet and speech technology, the way of people’s learning methods has significant change. Educational games have been attracting more and more users in its learning, richness and interestingness. There are a large number of school-age children in our country. In order to make their children keep pace with times, parents spend lots of money on educational investment. But learning English is such a problem for Chinese students. The main reason is that lacking of language learning environment and interest. If we can apply educational games into oral English learning, not only can we provide a pleasant learning atmosphere for students, but also stimulate their learning interest and creativity.However according to current situation, this research in our county began comparatively late, and researchers mainly concentrated in the field of education. The development of theory and practice is unbalance, popularizing game-type education still has along way to go. Therefore combined with the status, starting from the game-type homework, This paper proposed a design framework of oral English learning which is suitable for pupils and carried out design practice on the basis of the framework. For the purpose of creating a pleasant learning environment and stimulating pupils’learning interest.Focusing on the idea of "User Centered Design", first of all, by analyzing the pupils’physical and psychological characteristics, this paper proposed the eduiainment’s design principle for school-age children according to the four aspects of HCI(Human Computer Interaction):content, cognition, operation and emotion. Secondly, design research was conducted from students, parents and English teachers. Digging into user needs, classifying product functions and designing the low-fidelity prototyping through the design methods of questionnaire inquiry, user interviews, behavioral observations, persona and so on. At the same time,we divided the game’s core page into three areas (Cognitive area, Operating area and Feedback area). It gives a good reference for language-learning game design. Finally, according to this theory, we took the project of Chivox (Interesting homework of Shanxue website) as a practical case. Integrating ASR(Automatic Speech Recognition) technology, by modifying the game model again and again through the methods of focus group, user testing and thinking-aloud, we completed the game design of "BANANA", which is used for pupils’oral English-learning. Then the game is evaluated by user ratings, furthermore, the validity of the theory is verified.Currently educational games are still an emerging thing in China, but with the deep development of education reform and mobile Internet, it will arouse more and more attention. From the point view of design, this paper introduced the theoretical research and practical exploration for pupils’oral English learning game. It enriches the content of educational games theory, and provides a new idea for the design of edutainment.