Use of Zimmer Twins to facilitate foreign language learning

Why is the study important?

Encouraging young students to express their thoughts and ideas in a creative and innovative way is an important task of K-12 teachers, especially primary school teachers. Kids explore and learn in an amazingly fast speed if they are facilitated to do so. One of the tools that can really empower young learners’ creativity and innovation is Zimmer Twins, tool for creating one’s own story. It is a site devoted to kids who want to create and share their animated digital story.

I would like to investigate the use of Zimmer Twins in a foreign language classroom, specifically in a Basic English class. It is important for any language learners to be able to express their inner self and ideas/concepts innovatively and uniquely in the target language. I would like to find out how they would do this conversationally and narratively through hands-on experience with this tool.

Who are the subjects/participants of the study?

Even Zimmer Twins is specially designed for students of 8-14 years of age; however, this study will take students’ English language proficiency as a moderator variable. Therefore, participants’ age can be of a wide range, as long as they are foreign speakers of English and their English proficiency level are intermediate.

This will be an experimental study. Participants will be divided into control and treatment groups who both receive the same content instruction. The difference is, control group will be asked to do and submit assignments in a traditional way whereas treatment group will carry out their assignments using Zimmer Twins after being trained on how to use the tool.

What is/are the basic research question/s?

Is Zimmer Twins an effective tool to promote English conversational and narrative writing among language learners?

Where would the study be conducted?

In a foreign language classroom, intermediate level, focus on skills (reading, writing, listening) development.

What is the time frame of the study?

2 months of Basic English, focus on skills development

What type of data would be collected?

The assignments are to produce conversational or narrative writings on the topics of instruction (i.e. tenses in English, unconditional sentences, English verbs of motion, state, think, English adjectives, etc.)

Data to be collected would be

·         Writing pretest scores

·         Writing posttest scores

·         Survey about students’ experience with Zimmer Twins (treatment group)

How might the data be analysed?

Pretest scores will be compared with posttest ones to find out whether there is a significant difference in the performance between the control and treatment group.

Survey result analysis would be used to explore treatment group’s experience with the tool, and to help explain the difference in the two group’s performance (if any).

Inspired by the following source:

Admin, (2014), iLearn Technology, an edublog about integrating technology into the classroom, retrieved from http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=2180