The possible benefits of digital games for language learning and teaching have received increasing interest in recent years. Games are said, amongst others, to be motivating, to lower affective barriers in learning, and to encourage foreign or second language (L2) interaction. But how do learners actually experience the use of games? What impact does gameplay have on students’ perceptions of themselves as learners, and how does this affect their learning practice? These questions are important as they are likely to influence the success of digital game-based language learning, and as a result the way teachers might integrate games into the curriculum. In this study we investigated the experiences of five students who had participated in a fifteen-week game-based learning program at a university in Thailand. We conducted six interviews with each of them (for a total of 30 interviews) to identify what impact gameplay had in particular on their willingness to communicate in English (MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément & Noels, 1998). The results showed that gameplay had a number of benefits for the participants in this study, in particular in terms of lowering their affective barriers to learning and increasing their willingness to communicate. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of further research and classroom practice.
This paper reports on a study into the effects of digital game play on learners' interaction in English as a foreign language. 30 Thai learners of English enrolled in a 15-week University language course completed 18 face-to-face classroom lessons, as well as six sessions playing Ragnarok Online, a popular online role-playing game. The game had been altered to include a number of quests for learners to complete. To gauge the effects of playing the games, participants' language use in both text and voice chats was recorded and analysed. Game play resulted in a large and significant increase in English interaction that used a wider range of discourse functions, and also resulted in significantly more frequent contributions compared with English interaction in class. We discuss some of the theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings.
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