Enhancing Students’ English Language Acquisition Through Video Games in Salatiga

Abstract

Video games have been growing a lot in this modern era. Nevertheless, video games are often considered meaningless and waste a lot of time. Therefore, there have been numbers of researchers who studied video games’ role in English Language Teaching. However, only a few of them focused on the strategies that learners use to learn English through playing video games, especially in Indonesia. Henceforth, the purpose of this research is to examine the strategies that learners use in learning English by playing video games. This research involves four participants from a private university in Salatiga from various faculties. The data was collected through interviews and observation. The findings demonstrated several strategies the participants used to learn English with the help of video games. Those strategies are trying to understand the story, using electronic translators or dictionaries, reading the texts and listening to dialogues, imitating what the characters say, and understanding the instructions of the game.