THE RELATIONS BETWEEN STUDENTS’ ANXIETY AND INTEREST IN PLAYING AN ONLINE GAME

ABSTRACT

In this modern, and technologically dependent society, people seek to improve human performance, get higher productivity and increase user satisfaction with technologies. In Chinese society, Chinese Idiom learning plays an important role in vocabulary learning which cultural and social functions are involved. Therefore, an online game named ‘Chinese Idioms String Up Puzzle’ was developed by the Digital Game-Based Learning Laboratory, National Taiwan Normal University in Taiwan to motivate students to learn Chinese Idiom. A survey was conducted to examine participants’ anxiety, interest and cognitive load by using this new computer-assisted game. According to the survey, students felt this new program is interesting and would like to play again in the future. For those students who believe anxiety helps their performance, and for those students whose degree of anxiety lowered after completing the test, they tend to have greater interest in playing the game. Findings of the Partial Least Squares (PLS) contribute to an expanded understanding of both psychological anxiety and somatic anxiety influence on their cognitive load, whereas both anxieties was not significantly related to their playing interest. In addition, the study results indicated that the higher degree of psychological and somatic anxiety, the greater cognitive load of the participants.