As all of us know, nowadays we almost cannot do without English. We study it to be able to communicate with people in foreign countries, to have a chance to find a good job and so on. But still, most of the students don’t know the language.
And what should people do to learn a foreign language? We should know the rules of pronunciation, we should have good vocabulary, we should know grammar rules and we should be able to speak fluently.
In our time, children start playing computer games when they are very young, and later on a great number of teenagers spend most of their free time playing. It is one of the most quickly growing industry in Russia and abroad. According to statistics, the annual growth in computer games industry is about 8 per cent.
The hypothesis of our study:
Computer games have a positive effect on learning English, on enlarging players’ vocabulary, on improving their listening and pronunciation skills, and on increasing our motivation in learning English.
The purpose of the research is to find out if playing computer games helps us to know English better.
To do all this we had to solve several tasks:
- Firstly, to select the material on the chosen topic;
- Secondly, to analyze the content of the English language in computer games;
- More over, we were to conduct a survey among our school’s students about their interests in playing computer games;
- Then we were to analyze how computer games affect the process of learning English among our peers;
- and finally, to describe the results.
To begin with we made a quiz with the help of Google Forms and asked students of our school to answer the questions. We asked them if they play computer games, how much time they spend playing and asked to do some tasks in English
It was necessary to assess the level of English of those students who play computer games and compare it with the knowledge of those who do not play games or use Russian translation of the games. By comparing the results we have made a conclusion
In our study 50 students of grades from 7th to 9th were interviewed , ninety percent of them said they played computer games, and more than half of players (52 fifty-two %) spent from 1 to 3 hours daily. About 26% usually play for an hour or so, and 14% of players spend more than 3 hours per day. It means that most of my peers spend a reasonable amount of time playing computer games.
In our research, we took into consideration only English games because Russian were not in any practical value for our study. In the research, we were faced with such a term as "language localization.". It is a partial or complete translation of the game to Russian.
When conducting a survey among the students of our school, it turned out that 26% of them do not use the Russian translation of the game, and another 34% prefer the English version.
So, what kind of games are played by modern teenagers without the localized version? This is The Sims, GTA, Dragon Age, Dota, Township, Oblivion and Hay Day. These games often require regular online communication with other players, that is why the player has to use the international language - English, because often the game is played from different countries.
The vast majority of respondents (78%) believe that playing computer games can improve their level of English, 12% do not believe in the use of games, but 10% believe that the games do not help in the study. To find out who is right, we have analyzed the results of a test in English
As the test shows , those students who play computer games give more correct answers (64%), while those who do not - 56%.
To make sure that the results of our study are correct, we have taken part in the practical part of the project ourselves. For two weeks, we had been playing computer games in English and communicating with foreigners during the game. It helped us to enlarge our vocabulary and made us speak more fluently.
CONCLUSION
Computer games help in learning the English language and most of the respondents use the English version of the games, which helps them to increase the level of their English.
The use of computer games makes it much easier, faster and more fun to learn English, improve memory, attention, imagination and the ability to find patterns. Thus, playing a game a teenager spends time usefully. However, we shouldn’t completely immerse ourselves in the virtual world of games not to become addicted to them.
We hope that our work will be of interest to many students and teachers.
Thank you for your listening - and now if you have any questions, I would be pleased to answer them.
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