Enhancing the language learning experience : activities for integrating games into language learning in line with the Icelandic curriculum

Abstract

Children nowadays are born into a fast-phased world saturated with technology and seem to get bored easily. Teacher-centered classrooms, that comprise lecturing succeeded with a writing activity or a gap-filling worksheet, do not fit well with their fast-phased world. A classroom full of bored students can generate irritability with those students who want to listen and learn, and the teacher might have to waste unnecessary time on disrupting students. I decided on the topic for my thesis due to my own experience of using games in the language classroom. I have seen sleepy and bored students brought back to life and walking out of the classroom upbeat and happy with their acquired knowledge. Games can improve a broken team-spirit and improve the moral of the class. More importantly, using games has shown to decrease anxiety among students, increase motivation, promote learner autonomy and independence, and they even seem to learn faster and retain more information. In this thesis I discuss two types of games; analog games, which are the “good-old” fashioned kinesthetic games like hot-potato, Bingo and scavenger hunt games, and digital game-based learning activities (DGBL), which promote learning through computer use. I will give examples of both these types of games in Appendix A and B.