Acquiring English Through Virtual Worlds
Abstract
This article presents the results from an MA thesis published at the University of Agder in Norway in 2019 (Dasic, 2019). It studies the connection between Norwegian lower secondary pupils’ gaming habits and their essay grades and lexical richness in their L2 English, as well as their attitudes towards gaming and language learning. Data were collected from 14 Norwegian lower secondary pupils, with a total of 20 essays Three methods were used to answer the re- search questions. First, statistical tests were run in SPSS to discover possible differences in grades in correlation to time spent gaming. Following, a qualitative corpus analysis of 12 texts was conducted to see what lies behind the quantitative numbers. Finally, six semi-structured interviews were conducted with the aim to elicit the participants’ attitudes toward gaming and language learning with their longitudinal aspects in mind.
The results revealed that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the amount of time the participants spent gaming and their English essay grades. The findings also suggest that large amounts of time on spent gaming are beneficial to other aspects of the student’s English proficiency, such as greater self-confidence when speaking English and creativity when writing. In addition, findings concerning the motivation behind gaming suggest that teachers of L2 English should be aware of the possibility to implement activities either in the classroom or as homework to enhance some of the pupils’ motivation for learning English. Furthermore, some of the informants in the interviews reported a desire for more gaming centered or open-school writing tasks, as they believe it would give them a greater opportunity to show knowledge gained by gaming
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