| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
Gaming, and how gaming impacts students and their learning is a topic that is frequently discussed and studied in both research and educational practices. Studies have found that there is a positive correlation between out-of-school interaction with the English language during gameplay and an increase in English proficiency for Scandinavian learners of English (Brevik, 2016; Sylvén & Sundqvist, 2012). However, the impact of games has not been widely studied yet. This thesis studies recordings of conversations of Norwegian 8th and 9th grade students while they play the game “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”. The main goal of this project is to analyze how much of the communication is, in fact, in English, and find out if and how much the students switched back to Norwegian. A secondary goal was to study the impact of gameplay in the classroom on language learning, especially in the way it impacts student motivation. This study found that more than 90% of the communication during the gameplay was in English, indicating that “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” indeed facilitates large amounts of English use in the classroom. The limited use of Norwegian was mostly related to regulation of interpersonal relationships, although a few cases of code-switching may be related to troubles in lexical access. The impact on student motivation as a result of playing this game seemed to correlate with the degree to which the game met the students’ psychological needs, as described by Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2020). Successful completion of in-game tasks led to increased motivation, while repeated failure led to decreased motivation and students commenting negatively on the game, before ultimately giving up completely. | |