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AbstractEven though developing speaking skills is the essential key to achieving proficiency in a target language, there are some pupils (grades 4-6) who do not participate in communication tasks in English classroom. Thus, the purpose of this literature overview is to investigate the reasons for the unwillingness of some young learners to speak and interact in English. In addition, a variety of effective teaching strategies will be observed and analyzed. The used methods were different electronic databases, such as ERC, ERIC and Google Scholar, to access relevant peer-reviewed journal articles to our research questions. The observed and analyzed articles showed that there are some pupils who do not interact because English teachers often focus too much on reading and writing skills rather than on speaking skills. The limitation of communication tasks and large classroom sizes are other mitigating factors. In addition, teachers often using the first language in class resulted in pupils doing the same. This contributes to a lack of motivation and confidence in speaking English for some learners. This study identifies teaching strategies and activities that can be used by the teacher to raise motivation and confidence in speaking English. Results have indicated that the use of Vygotsky's sociocultural learning theory was very useful to involve every pupil in authentic communication tasks, which also provided a supportive communicative environment. Task-based and theme-based learning, such as stories, songs, games, project work and pair work is shown to be beneficial to increase pupils’ motivation towards speaking.

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Submitted by Kleber Silva (kleberbs@ufba.br) on 2017-06-06T18:36:46Z No. of bitstreams: 1 thesis_Almerindo.pdf: 28859099 bytes, checksum: 174d845c1992efdff75a145e0ec76a4d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Vanessa Reis (vanessa.jamile@ufba.br) on 2017-06-16T15:25:18Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 thesis_Almerindo.pdf: 28859099 bytes, checksum: 174d845c1992efdff75a145e0ec76a4d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-16T15:25:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 thesis_Almerindo.pdf: 28859099 bytes, checksum: 174d845c1992efdff75a145e0ec76a4d (MD5) / O advento do Kinect desencadeou o crescimento de aplicações voltadas à interação natural, reconhecimento de gestos e ambientes interativos. Com o tempo, percebeu-se que as soluções de interfaces baseadas nesses novos tipos de interação cresciam de maneira rápida e desordenada, sem qualquer preocupação com a formalização de etapas de desenvolvimento. Além disso, questões relativas à forma de representar estas interações, ao contexto onde elas ocorrem e qual o comportamento do ambiente em resposta a estas interações tornaram-se relevantes. Neste sentido, esse trabalho traz como contribuição uma abordagem prática para o desenvolvimento de ambientes interativos através do modelo Where-What-Why-How, ou simplesmente, 3W1H. A solução teve como base uma compilação de tarefas comumente executadas neste tipo de desenvolvimento e relatadas em diversos trabalhos correlatos. A solução parte de três questões principais: (I) quais as reações devem ser disparadas no ambiente interativo; (II) quais as situações que disparam a execução destas reações no ambiente; e, (III) qual o comportamento esperado uma vez que estas situações sejam reconhecidas. O comportamento esperado do ambiente pode ser visto como um conjunto de estados que definem o controle das reações e mudanças dentro do ambiente real ou virtual. A transição entre estes estados comportamentais é feita a partir da composição entre eventos associados, por exemplo, ao reconhecimento de gestos do usuário quando interage com o sistema. A validação da proposta é feita através de alguns estudos de casos completos, que contemplam todas as fases de desenvolvimento e a implementação física do ambiente interativo. Os estudos de caso foram construídos com o auxílio do framework Touch The Air - TTair, uma outra contribuição importante do trabalho.

When games were first developed for in-home use, they were primarily targeted almost exclusively at children and males. However, today’s marketplace manifests a more diverse population plays Internet-enabled games that can be played virtually anywhere. The average gamer is now 30 years old. Many gamers, obviously, are much older. Yet more strikingly, and more germane to this study’s purpose, 47% of the U.S. gamer population is female, as compared to 40% in 2010. Despite these trends the gaming industry remains a male-dominated culture. The marketer’s job is to facilitate game engagement and to motivate gamers to play. The notion of “engagement” is not new in business. The term was developed in the last decade. Many studies were devoted to understand, explain, and define the term. It suggests that within interactive, dynamic business environments, consumer engagement (CE) represents a strategic position that companies can use to enhance their sales growth, competitive advantage, and profitability. Moreover, there are three levels of engagement in any experiential consumption (i.e., playing video game): presence, flow, and psychological absorption. The findings of this study affirm that consumer engagement, including presence, flow and psychological absorption are explanatory factors that impact gamer’s purchase intentions. Our results show that consumers experience different mental engagement in an interactive environment (i.e., playing video games) compared to passive environments (i.e., visiting a website). These findings change our understanding of consumers’ engagement and flow state. We also found that male and female gamers experience different engagement level. However, we did not find a significant result that masculinity and femininity traits impact gamers’ engagement or intention. We argue that macroeconomic factors results in sales fluctuation may have resulted in reject in this hypothesis. Thus, marketers shed a light into the consumer’s interactive environment and flow states in that environments. Consumers not only determine the value in using a product as Vargo and Lusch suggested, but they also create that value. Also, consumer experience is an ongoing process that does not have a specific point to start, making the value creation a temporally accumulative process that includes past, present, and future experience. Therefore, the value created by consumers is not created while physically interacting with a device to play, but it may include imagined and indirect interaction with the product. Therefore, consumers (i.e., gamers) need to maintain a balance between presence and psychological absorption (i.e., flow) to get the best experience in play video gaming. Empirical evidence suggest that consumers’ flow state engagement is the most important variable in determining their ensuing purchase intention for video games, regardless of game genre.