Lena Straßburger

Introductory seminars to German linguistics lay the foundation for further linguistic course work and the students’ interest and advancement in specific topics. Therefore, it is essential for students to understand and remember elementary terminology and methodology and to be able to apply and transfer their knowledge. To support teaching through autonomous learning and to deepen the students’ knowledge and motivation in phonetics and phonology, we developed the board game Ph[o:]nix based on the well-known ScrabbleTM board game. We modified the game by exchanging letters for phonemes and by adding event cards covering further knowledge relevant to the subject area of phonology and phonetics. We invited students of introductory seminars to play the game and to participate in an assessment to evaluate the game qualitatively and quantitively. We found that students who played the game twice showed a significant improvement relative to a non-playing control group. Additionally, the game was rated very positive by the majority of the players, for instance with respect to the fun factor or additional benefits for exam preparation. mehr

In order to enhance students’ intrinsic motivation and learning achievement in the field of semantics, we developed the board game Seamantix, which supports teaching in introductory semantics through autonomous learning. Seamantix focuses on basic semantic knowledge including semantic relations, propositional logic, truth-conditional semantics, semantic roles and verb classifications. Players of Seamantix explain semantic notions without speaking by positioning tokens on pictograms and thereby provide their fellow players with critical cues. An evaluation of the learning curve via a practice test presented before and after exposure to the board game revealed that students who played the game showed a significant improvement compared to a non-playing control group. Furthermore, the majority of the players rated the design and material associated with the game positively and indicated that they enjoyed playing it. mehr