A Quasi-Experiment Investigating the Impact of Letter Bingo on Hong Kong Junior Primary School Students’ Spelling Performance with Reference to Perceptions of Motivation in Learning English as L2

This quasi-experiment investigates the impact of Letter Bingo (a modified Bingo game encompassing phonics instruction) on the spelling performance and perceived motivation in learning English of 27 Hong Kong Primary 3 students. Three volunteer groups (Experimental Group, n=8; Placebo Group, n=9; Control Group, n=10) participated over one school term. Quantitative data for measuring spelling performance were drawn from 5 sets of dictation scores and qualitative data for measuring motivation were drawn from 3 interviews with students, parents and teachers. Unexpectedly, all groups experienced a decline in spelling performance over the duration of the study. For the Experimental Group, findings drawn from the quantitative data show no positive impact of Letter Bingo on spelling performance and findings drawn from the qualitative data reveal that some students perceived a positive impact of Letter Bingo on their spelling performance and motivation (however, this finding is not supported by parent and teacher perceptions, and more importantly, is not supported by the quantitative data). Noting that in this quasi-experiment, the quantitative data are the main data and the qualitative data are interpreted in the context of the quantitative data, the qualitative data alone might suggest that limited positive impact is rendered unreliable by the power of the quantitative data. Caution is needed when interpreting findings of this study because of the methodological concerns including the small sample size, the lack of randomization and breadth of interview questions as well as data relating to the perceived motivation of the Control Group. It is firmly concluded that the efficacy of Letter Bingo has not been robustly demonstrated in this study. Acknowledging that generalizations of the findings to the wider population are limited and are not the objective of this study, this quasi-experiment demonstrates some methodological insights into the investigation of using games in educational settings thus providing groundwork for further research on the impact of learning games particularly with language learning.