Videogames and listening skills

Abstract

To obtain desired learning outcomes in listening, it is vital to develop some strategies to make listening more interesting, practical, and helpful. The integration of videogames into activities for English language learners is one such strategy. Therefore, the goal of this study was to establish a relationship between videogames and listening comprehension of students from second semester of Languages Center of "Universidad Indoamérica". The research methodology was preexperimental with a quantitative approach. The main research instrument was the Cambridge KET (Key English Test) level A2 Listening Section for pre-test and posttest in order to gather data from 12 university students (6 males and 6 females). In addition, the results obtained from this test were assessed under Listening Comprehension criteria of A2 Key exam form Cambridge English Qualifications. Each section was evaluated out of 5 points in order to obtain 15 points in total. A preexperimental design was also used, with eight interventions administered over the course of three weeks, to improve listening performance. These interventions included using videogames for listening activities, particularly Genshin Impact, which provided English dialogue and conversations with English subtitles. Kolmogorov-Smirnov and non-parametric test were used to evaluate the acquired data in IBM SPSS statistical software in order to see if the values had a normal distribution and to verify the hypothesis. The results showed that the treatment had a positive effect on students' listening comprehension of announcements and other spoken content when people spoke reasonably slow; participants could identify the main information of dialogues as well as the main idea, message, key, or theme in monologues or short dialogues.