Wordsearch, an Educational Game in Language Learning

Abstract

In recent years, digital games have taken an important place in the lives of children. Through play, children acquire digital literacy informally, even before they go to school. Games can also be used as a language learning tool nowadays. In this paper we propose a digital educational game, Wordsearch, for learning a foreign language vocabulary. In order to evaluate the game and to test its effectiveness in learning vocabulary, Wordsearch was evaluated by 11 students. Results show that the user interface of the application is simple and easy to use, and that the proposed Wordsearch Puzzle is likely to help long term vocabulary recall, while it makes learning fun by creating internal motivation to the students.

An Analysis of Game Design Elements Used in Digital Game-Based Language Learning

“…Cao Chung Weighing an Elephant [123] The Elephant and the Blind Men [123] Simulated real-world 3D-DGBLL [42] Contextual learning RPGs [120] Handheld sensor-based vocabulary games [112] RPG for incidental lexicon acquisition [90] WiCFG [59] Interactive learning environment [100,127] Virtual Knee Surgery by Edheads [126] Scenario-Based Interactive Environment [136] Prêt à négocier [64] The Conference Interpreter [135] Game-Based System for ASL using Kinect [66] Little Ingenius [81] Idiomatico [130] ARCS-based game [70] My Pet Shop [115] ImALeG [94] Kes Sesi [48] Cool Nurse [74] Virtual Reality Assisted Language Learning game [121] Enskill English [124] TALSQ [72] DiMaCA-based application [21] MMORPG-based English Learning Environment (MELE) [84] Spaceteam ESL [71] Competitive Cloze Game [87] Complexity-based competition game [86] SELS [51] Contextual RPG [85] Wordsearch [52] BSL RPG game [105] Table A3.…”

Mapping the landscape of serious digital language learning games: Towards a Serious-Digital Game-based Language Learning (S-DGBLL) teacher competence framework

“…Many of the games (n = 24) are not categorised with reference to a specific genre. Importantly, a number of games presented in the papers emerge as gamified tasks: from their description it can be learnt that they are digital versions of lexical activities used in coursebooks, such as wordsearch (Butler et al, 2014;Goumas et al, 2020), hangman (Logothetis et al, 2021), or jigsaw (Hwang et al, 2016;Sandberg et al, 2011). These results echo those obtained in Acquah and Katz's study, who found educational and mini-games, role-play, adventure, simulation and strategy game genres implemented in the studies, and in the Borona et al (2018) study, which discusses the activities qualified by the researchers as "educational games" which are not games.…”

“…Mulder et al (2021) report applying the Elo system for chess rating to provide each participant with a good amount of challenge. There are papers that allude to design principles or frameworks, such as Goumas et al (2020) who discuss the design of their game; yet, in doing so, it appears that the researchers present the research procedures in their study but do not provide the specific design principles that guided the design of the game. Similarly, Lee ( 2022) mentions the ADDIE model; however, it seems that the model is used to describe an AR-based study, without specifically addressing game design principles.…”

A Critical Review of Educational Games as a Tool for Strengthening Digital Literacy

“…Wordsearch, an educational game in language learning (Goumas et al, 2020) Wordsearch games can facilitate foreign language learning because they can memorize words, provide internal learning motivation and can be effective f in remembering vocabulary.…”