Gamification of Mobile-based Japanese Language Shadowing

Learning second language using shadowing technique is effective, but also tends to be boring, less motivating, and has no feedback from teacher on whether the pronounciation is already correct or not. On the other hand, there are various gamification elements that can be applied such as progression, rewards, leaderboard, etc., which can provide a learning environment that continues to motivate student to achieve better result. One of the essential element is direct-feedback to determine whether the answers given by the students are already correct or not, by calculating similarity between student's speech and reference speech using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). In this study, a gamified Japanese language learning application based on mobile platform named “Shadowingu” is developed. The evaluation results showed that gamification is preferred and have significant Effect Size on student's motivation, when compared to the conventional shadowing method, as well as have positive effects on overall learning experience.