The Effect of Online Games on English Students' Vocabulary Mastery

Abstract

Nowadays, online games are one of the keys to learning and acquiring vocabulary subconsciously by creating an interactive and motivating context to acquire new words. In language, vocabulary plays an important role in the process of learning as it allows people to understand and communicate with other people. Vocabulary is defined as a list or collection of words usually alphabetically arranged and explained or lexicon, a stock of words used in language. Online games have potential benefits in vocabulary acquisition as a lot of vocabulary can be found through technology. Moreover, in online games, people can meet the person from other countries to practice their knowledge of the vocabulary. Therefore, the researcher is interested in studying the effect of playing online games on students' English vocabulary mastery. This study used a quantitative ex post facto as a research design. The data for this research was collected from 42 students from the 5th semester of the English department from the University of Islam Malang online with the use of Google forms to administer the questionnaire and vocabulary mastery test. The questionnaire consisted of 20 items about online gaming habits and the test consisted of 40 items about vocabulary and terms that commonly appear in online games. The data are analyzed using correlation analysis and an independent sample t-test to measure the difference in vocabulary mastery of frequent and moderate gamers. In result shows that there is a significant correlation between students' habit of playing an online game and students' vocabulary mastery. This indicates that the better students' habit in playing online games using English setting the better their vocabulary mastery. However, the result indicates that there is no significant difference between frequent and moderate gamers because the mean score of frequent gamers has a slight difference from those of moderate gamers. Keywords: Online Gaming, Vocabulary Mastery, Comparion