In the recent years, students' engagement has been the focus of concern in the US Various studies have found that students' academic performances were directly affected by students' engagement In Hong Kong, research on this topic has not yet been found This research aimed to find out how the behaviors of three primary school English teachers' affect their students' engagements The teachers were observed on how they presented their lessons on one of the units of the textbooks Each teacher chose three students as samples of this research Ways of data collection included: lesson observation, video-taping of classroom teaching, in-class tape-recording of the sample students, and interviewing the teachers and sample students
The findings of this research perceived the following six behaviors that were of vital importance to students' engagement: (1) Providing learning opportunities for students, (2) Roles of teachers, (3) Student-teacher dialogue, (4) Teachers' demand on students' understanding of what they have been taught, (5) Teachers' self-reflection while teaching, and (6) Teachers' expectations on students
There are three aspects of engagements: affective engagement, behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement Students display different levels of engagements due to their teachers' behaviors while teaching This research found that students' behavioral engagement is associated with superficial affective engagement but does not necessarily correlate with cognitive engagement On the other hand, cognitive engagement is closely associated with profound affective engagement It was also found that students' engagement is influenced by the following psychological factors: (1) autonomy, competence and relatedness of the Self Determination Theory, (2) self-efficacy, and (3) students' learning goal orientation In order to elevate students' engagement, teachers have to provide learning opportunities at a suitable level of difficulties for the students and at the

Designed to make use of the immense power of World Wide Web (WWW) and facilitate a paradigm shift in education, VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a new game-based situated learning paradigm which aims to enable student-centered learning taking place in a game-based interactive virtual environment Briefly speaking, the VISOLE approach is composed of 3 phases in which students have to (Phase 1) preliminarily acquire some high-level knowledge in specific subject domains through teachers' scaffolding; (Phase 2) actively participate as a game character in a game-based virtual interactive environment to construct knowledge and skills from their near real-life game-play experiences; (Phase 3) reflect and generalize their game-based learning experiences through teachers' debriefing
Under the present theoretical context of learning, digital games and game-based learning, this dissertation exploited and reinforced the VISOLE learning paradigm It also delineated the design and development of the first VISOLE game---"Farmtasia" and presented the empirical research on investigating the educational realization and accomplishment of VISOLE
Based on the specificity of educational technology research, "Development Research Method" was adopted as the methodological framework in the whole study Under this framework, a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed for data collection and analysis, including the knowledge pre- and post-test, generic-skill test, perception survey, in-depth interviews as well as artifacts of students' reflective journals, reports and game-playing records All of these intensively focused on investigating students' and teachers' perceptions, students' learning motivation, behaviors, effectiveness with respect to the VISOLE approach and researching the design strategies for situated educational games
In the present research, most of the teachers and students were basically positive towards VISOLE