Online games and EFL

Individual post

By Abnellys Ochoa.

During the last decades, it is been said that it is necessary to include strategies that promote the interest of students in the process of learning because this is the easiest way in which the new information can be stored in the long term memory. In addition, some authors have studied the influence that motivation has among this process and the result is always the same; when students are motivated they learn things easily.

In this same order of ideas, it is needed to ask ourselves this: what could be more motivating than learning while playing? Online games are an excellent option to learn new words, phases, forms, places and others. This is, of course, something to take into account when teaching or studying English as a foreing language. According to Wikipedia, an online game is a game that is played over some kind of computer network; the majority of the time, this is linked to the use of internet or a similar technology.

Consciously or not, players of online games in English always learn new vocabulary because they need to know the meaning of these words to play or to overcome the obstacles present at the different stages of the games. In this case, the vocabulary appears in a real context what can also help the player to guess the meaning of the words; so, dictionaries are not necessary at all. This is another reason that makes the process of language adquisition more natural.

There are web sites that offer games specifically directed to the adquisition of English as a second language, but not only those pages help Spanish students to learn English. All kind of online games contribute to the language adquisition, in a certain way.

There are some links for you to visit and study what has been written in this article:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_game
• http://www.englishmedialab.com/grammar_games.html
• http://englishflashgames.blogspot.com/2008/05/hangman.html
• http://runescape.com/