Studying China's Tang poetry is a crucially integrated part of the language curriculum in primary schools because it is an important part of its cultural heritage and classical literature. However, due to the fact that Tang poetry is written in classical Chinese, which is quite different from modern Chinese Mandarin, and the complex categories of this poetry style, learning Tang poetry can be a challenging experience for many students. To address this problem, this study developed an interactive multimodal application based on the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media to learn Tang poetry in an interactive way. In order to assess the effectiveness of this method, a pretest-posttest control group experiment was conducted. The experiment included eighty third-grade students randomly and equally divided into experimental and control groups from an elementary school in Xinzheng, Henan Province, to test (1) whether the interactive multimodal application improves students' reading comprehension of Tang poetry and (2) whether the application enhances students' intrinsic and/or extrinsic motivation in learning Tang poetry. A multimodal interactive application was used by the experimental group to learn Tang poetry, while the control group used a traditional classroom method. According to the study's findings, it was found that students' intrinsic motivation and comprehension of Tang poetry improved through the use of the interactive multimodal application mode.
Existing empirical research has demonstrated the positive effects of flipping the classroom to improve student motivation and achievement by flipping in-class learning content to pre-class. However, the flipped classroom approach requires that students be engaged and motivated in the pre-class stage to ensure that the in-class learning activities run smoothly. Previous studies have highlighted the difficulties that students often encounter when trying to learn Chinese characters in Chinese language classes, especially those who are in the early stages of learning the language. Therefore, in this study, a gamified interactive e-book was developed and used in a flipped classroom for Chinese character learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, a pre-test and post-test control group experimental design was used. The participants were 90 s-grade students from a public primary school in Zhengzhou, China, who were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group: the students who used a gamified interactive e-book in a Chinese character learning flipped classroom (GIEFC group), the students who used a traditional flipped classroom (TFC group), and the students who used a traditional teaching classroom (TTC group). The experimental results indicated that students in the GIEFC group scored higher than those in the TFC and TTC groups in terms of learning achievements and motivation. In addition, the experimental results also demonstrated the positive effects of gamified interactive e-books in flipped classroom learning. Future research could explore a variety of different types of game elements as well as the extension of research to other subjects.