A Study On The Design Of A 3D Educational Game For Foreign Language Learners Based On Unreal 4 Engine And Its Application

3D educational game is a well-concerned topic in the field of computer-assisted language learning(CALL)and its affordances,such as authenticity,immersion and creativeness,are supported by the Net Generation.At present,most of the recent 3D virtual contexts for language learning are commercial games and their learning resources may involve intellectual property disputes.Therefore,the needs of using 3D educational games to improve language skills of foreign language learners is becoming an urgent call at home and abroad.Given the above situations,this study attempted to develop an indie 3D educational game and then explore its influence on foreign language learners’ vocabulary learning and writing performances,with the aim to solve the following three questions: 1)Are there any significant differences in foreign language learners’ vocabulary learning outcomes between 3D educational game and conventional multimedia learning material?If there are differences,in what ways? 2)To what extent may the 3D educational game improve foreign language learners’ writing performances in levels of accuracy and complexity? 3)Based on the results of the above questions,what are the implications can be found in designing a 3D English educational game for researchers and developers?Based on the learning behavior model of foreign language learners summarized by Lin et al.in 2020 and designing experiences of authoritative empirical studies in 3D educational game abroad,this research used a 3D engine named Unreal 4 to develop an3 D educational game for English learning.In this study,25 non-English major undergraduates from Chongqing University were selected as research subjects,who were randomly divided into experimental and control groups.First,an independent sample t-test was conducted on the vocabulary learning outcome in pre-and post-tests,so as to explore the influence of 3D educational game for vocabulary learning.Then,a paired sample t-test was conducted to explore whether there were significant differences in their writing performances between pre-and post-tests.Finally,according to the results of above questions,this study put forward some specific and constructive suggestions on the design of 3D English education game.The results demonstrated that 1)3D educational game is more effective in promoting English vocabulary acquisition than conventional multimedia learning material,which is mainly reflected in the recognition,understanding and translation of vocabulary.2)3D educational games could improve foreign language learners’ writing complexity and accuracy to a certain extent.Specifically,after learning with 3D educational games,their syntactic accuracy,syntactic variety,right numbers of clauses and T-units,quantity and quality all improved significantly.However,no significant improvement was discovered in the lexical variety and correct word form.3)Based on the above results,this study proposed three suggestions for the design of 3D educational games: First,the learning content should supplement the hypernyms,hyponyms and antonyms of the target learning vocabulary to achieve incidental learning.Second,3D educational game should establish learners’ online learning archives to achieve individualized instruction.Third,game plots should be more logical and meaningful to maintain learners’ motivation and interest.Also,grammar knowledge could be introduced into learning content to improve learners’ language skills comprehensively.This research hopes to provide some reference for the subsequent research on 3D educational games in China,and also hopes to provide an effective learning method for foreign language,which in turn improves learners’ language skills.