The Impact of Non-educational Computer Games on Iranian Elementary Students’ Motivation and Perception of English Learning Achievement

Computer games in their enjoyable yet challenging environment and in their variety of contexts can serve as a useful tool in assessing students’ rate of language learning development, improve their perseverance, make them better motivated, enhance their production, perception and reasoning capacity, foster learners’ collaboration in sharing information, increase their ultimate attainment, and consequently, have a great impact on the language learning process in educational systems. Well-designed computer games can bring together ways of knowing, ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of caring, making the player an expert in the situated environment. They can captivate the attention of the player who experiences emotions which may positively impact on the learning process (Chen et al, 2010; Baker et al., 2010). The present study aims to examine the effect of non-educational computer games on Iranian elementary students’ motivation and perception of English learning achievement. Incorporating a quasi-experimental design, the study has been conducted on two elementary English classes comprising 30 students with an age range of 9 to 12. For 20 sessions, the participants played six non-educational games (including The Island Castaway, Shaman Odyssey and Rescue Team) for 30 minutes. The gaming context was very much related to the participants’ current course and learning exercises. The participants were divided into different groups, one of them became the main player, and the others were asked to follow his/her lead, sometimes assisting and talking to the main player in English. The students were instructed to simultaneously practice the new course and play the games, trying to concentrate and write the sentences, words or whatever they were asked to. One member in each group was also responsible for writing the fun points the came up during the lesson and then reporting it to the class. As for the purpose of the study, the students were asked to complete a questionnaire once before the introduction of the games and once at the end of the 20-session treatment. This was followed by a friendly structured interview about the students’ feelings and perceptions of how they were engaged in class activities and what they learned. The comparison of the coded pre- and post-questionnaire data and the interview results revealed that the participants gained higher learning motivation, attention and satisfaction in learning the new language, feeling highly assisted and hence more interested in learning English. The study, therefore, offers some approaches to and implications on applying non-educational computer games and their mechanisms, an issue not brought under the spotlight of sufficient research in the Iranian EFL learning and teaching context

کلیدواژه ها:

non-educational computer games ، production and perception capacity ، intrinsic motivation ، learning satisfaction