Our teaching approach
We’ve created a game to teach phrasal verbs as the target language. We use gap-fill within sentences as embedding language in context is regarded as best classroom practice.
One academic study in particular (Estaji and Montezari, 2022) summarised below, confirms the relevance of this for IELTS Speaking.
Also, we believe that vocabulary acquisition is a core problem for English language learners and that digital games are a valid route to addressing this.
We believe that games offer novel engagement strategies which can maximise learning, particularly as daily vocabulary work delivers compound benefits over time.
Lander and IELTS Speaking
When teaching IELTS Speaking, Lander found that students started the course with inadequate English vocabulary, both in terms of quantity and quality. Also, many test-takers had to reach a university-entrance grade (band 6.0 or over) in three to five months to meet visa application deadlines. This meant that the teaching response needed to be targeted and efficient.
For a band 7.0 in IELTS speaking, a test taker has to use ‘less common and idiomatic vocabulary with some awareness of style and collocation’. So, Lander used phrasal verbs to achieve this, as they easily replace regular verbs, and are applicable across the wide range of IELTS Speaking topics.
The intention of the game is to carry over this approach.
Supporting academic research
Amongst the lexical research into IELTS Speaking, Estaji’s and Montezari’s (2022) study on IELTS speaking band scores stands out as it investigated the importance of word combinations (collocations) to these band scores.
The researchers analysed transcripts of IELTS Speaking tests across bands 6, 7 and 8 for ten collocation types. They found that phrasal verbs, used in coordination with nouns and adverbs, occurred more in Speaking bands 7 and 8. They conclude that of the five types of collocation which impacted most on bands 6,7 and 8, three of those involved phrasal verbs used together with other words. To quote: “more advanced test-takers tended to use more complex patterns of collocational phrasal verbs”.
For us at Kinjugo, the challenge is to incorporate these collocations into the gameplay as we continue to iterate the game.