Exploring the impact of different types of E-learners’ anonymity on their learning engagement in competitive gamified language learning

The present study aims to explore the impact of two types of e-learners’ anonymity on their language learning engagement in a 50-day competitive gamified English vocabulary learning process. The two anonymity types were full anonymity, which means the participants were anonymous to both their peers and the instructor in the learning process, and partial anonymity, which required the participants to be anonymous only to their peers. One hundred and eighty adult e-learners were recruited as the participants and randomly assigned into three groups, with one group adopting the full anonymity pattern, one group using the partial anonymity pattern, and a third group employing the non-anonymity pattern. An online pretest, an online posttest and two online questionnaires were used as the research instruments. The two tests were used to assess the participants’ learning performance. One questionnaire was to obtain the participants’ self-report values on three scales of learning engagement, namely behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. The other questionnaire together with some interviews was applied to inquire about the participants’ attitudes toward anonymity in gamified learning. The results indicate that the full anonymity pattern exerted the most positive impact on the participants’ behavioral and emotional engagement, and this pattern also brought about the best learning performance on the posttest. However, the non-anonymity pattern outperformed the other two patterns on the cognitive engagement scale. Then the possible impact of anonymity on learning engagement and learning performance was discussed.