Innovation in Language Learning

The notion of using games in education is as old as games themselves. Games are a powerful force in technology-enhanced learning, and they have been for years. Computer games are today an important part of most children’s leisure lives and increasingly an important part of their culture so that videogames are useful instruments for learning specific strategies and for acquiring knowledge; they also develop the learning that is characteristic of the culture of the information society, and this learning is likely to have long-term consequences. In recent years there have been a number of studies of the use of computers in schools intended to explore whether these games can have any role in supporting educational goals. During the past few years, the acceptance of the potential benefits of educational gaming has increased gradually within the research community. For instance, it is widely agreed that educational games can increase the attractiveness of learning, giving an additional boost in the struggle against demotivation and dropouts, two issues that are very often closely related to learning. Digital games research has in the past six years become a legitimate field of study, not simply of game design and development, but of player communities, individual game play, the educative potentials of games, and games as an influential popular cultural force.

In that context, the purpose of this study is to describe process of developing digital game and to investigate students and teachers’ opinions with regard to digital game  developed for teaching purposes. In this sense first of all, a digital game was designed for 4th grade elementary school students.  In this game students engaged with different reading and writing tasks.

 In this study, qualitative research methodology was employed in collecting, analyzing and interpreting the data. For selecting of the participants criterion sampling method was used. Students attending at 4th grade of elementary school in Eskişehir province were selected as the participants. Qualitative data was collected by semi-structured interview form focusing on students’ and teachers’ opinions developed by researchers between the date of May and June 2015. Each interview was recorded to tape cassettes.

In analyzing and interpreting the data, descriptive analyze was used. Analysis and interpretation of data were realized within the following stages: the interviews recorded in cassettes were transcribed and a number was given to each line of the transcribed document, coding key of interviews was prepared, the data were coded on ‘Coding Key of Interviews’ sheet, systemized and analyzed data were interpreted. For the calculation of reliability, ‘Percentage of Agreement’ suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994) was used and 0.90 was found as a percentage of reliability. The possible contributions of the game in teaching native language was discussed in light of the findings.