Educational Gaming: The Influence of Video Games on ESL Students’ Writing Skills, (2012)

The purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of video games on students’ writing skills and their perception on the incorporation of video games in teaching writing. It focused on two specific skills which are vocabulary acquisition and narrative skills.

The study involved 30 students from a Malaysian public university. Data were collected via questionnaire surveys among ESL students in a local university followed by semi-structured interviews with selected respondents.

The study showed positive correlations between gaming and students’ writing skills development.One of the findings of the study was that the majority of students felt that video games enriched their vocabulary and that those words learnt were applied in their English writing tasks. Regarding narrative skills, video games helped enhance students’ imagination, character-building, generating and organizing ideas besides also influencing their choice of writing texts.

I liked this article because it provides an example of implementing video games to enhance ESL learners' writing skills. I think it would be a great idea if the authors asked participants about what types of games they usually play and provide some names of games for the readers.



Reference:

Yunus, M. M., Li, L. K. S., Said, N. E. M., NAJAH, K., KARIM, A., RABI’ATUL, A. J., & SHAMSUL, M. A. S. (2012). Educational Gaming: The Influence of Video Games on ESL Students’ Writing Skills. In WSEAS International Conference. Proceedings. Recent Advances in Computer Engineering Series (No. 7). WSEAS.