USING VIDEO GAME TO ENHANCE ENGLISH COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Abstract

Nowadays, technology has influenced almost every aspect of people’s lives. Education, especially English Language Teaching (ELT), is one of them. Teachers should be creative with emerging technology to capture their students’ attention as well as create fun activities in the classroom. One of the biggest challenges in teaching English is finding ways to encourage students to speak on their own without a teacher’s prompting. Very often, teachers need to resort to activities in classroom that create artificial situations - and even then, the teacher’s influence is felt by the students. The solution to these problems is using a media that is constantly updating and becoming increasingly popular every year but has received very little attention from the English Teaching community - video games. Esposito (2005) stated that a video game is a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a monitor or other display. The chosen games in this paper are (1) Ultimate Chicken Horse – a competitive racing game and (2) Overcooked - a cooperative game cooking game. The target age is 10-17 years old. These games, I believe, would provide the most benefits for both the students' soft and hard skills. The criteria for a game that has potential educational benefits are such: (1) Local Multiplayer – In essence, students need to be able to play the game in the same room for them to communicate effectively. (2) Co-operative Goal - I believe this will provide the most encouraging environment for students to practice. (3) Communicative - focused - The students understand that their success and overall enjoyment will be enhanced by communicating. I believe multiplayer games - specifically, ones with co-operative goals, can create a much better environment where students are self-motivated to communicate in English.