Investigating the effectiveness of game-based teaching and learning in enhancing student engagement in Mandarin class

In the past decade, the Australian government has been emphasising the importance for all Australians to become Asia literate by promoting the learning of Asian languages in schools. However, in spite of the unremitting efforts made by the government, researchers, and educators, the retention rate of students who study Chinese as a second language in school remains strikingly low. Previous studies have attributed this issue partly to the failure to engage students in class. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether a game-based teaching and learning (GBTL) approach is effective in engaging students studying Mandarin. It addressed the research question: Does GBTL impact the engagement of secondary school students studying Mandarin in the Western Sydney region? This study is a mixed methods action research that adopts a quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design. The research site was a high school located in the Western Sydney region. Seventy-four students from four Year 7 classes and a school mentor teacher participated in this study. Data collection involved student surveys, quantitative and qualitative in-class observations of the students, semistructured interviews with student participants and the mentor teacher, and the teacher–researcher’s self-reflection journal. The data were analysed using both quantitative and qualitative research techniques of statistical tests, coding, and thematic categorisation. Four key findings were revealed by the study: Key Finding 1: GBTL was effective in enhancing both high-achieving and lowachieving classes’ engagement level in Mandarin class. Key Finding 2: Quantitatively, there was no significant difference between the extent of changes in students’ engagement level of the high-achieving class and the low-achieving class, but qualitatively, the engagement level of the low-achieving class was found to be more enhanced than that of the high-achieving class. Key finding 3: The effectiveness of GBTL was heavily dependent on the teacher’s choice of game, the teacher’s practical knowledge, and students’ social skills. Key finding 4: The effectiveness of GBTL was achieved through the opportunity for students to interact with the target language, turning them into active learners and improving peer and teacher–student relationships. The findings support the effectiveness of GBTL in foreign language teaching in terms of enhancing students’ in-class engagement, and provide a series of recommendations to guide teachers and future research

Transfer of Gravitational Information through a Quantum Channel

Gravitational information is incorporated into an atomic state by correlation of the internal and external degrees of freedom of the atom, in the present study of the atomic interferometer. Thus it is difficult to transfer information by using a standard teleportation scheme. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for the transfer of gravitational information through a quantum channel provided by the entangled atomic state. Significantly, the existence of a quantum channel suppresses phase noise, improving the sensitivity of the atomic interferometer. Thus our proposal provides novel readout mechanism for the interferometer with an improved signal-to-noise ratio