Roadmap for the Development of EnLang4All: A Video Game for Learning English

Abstract

Nowadays, people are more predisposed to being self-taught due to the availability of online information. With digitalization, information appears not only in its conventional state, as blogs, articles, newspapers, or e-books, but also in more interactive and enticing ways. Video games have become a transmission vehicle for information and knowledge, but they require specific treatment in respect of their presentation and the way in which users interact with them. This treatment includes usability guidelines and heuristics that provide video game properties that are favorable to a better user experience, conducive to captivating the user and to assimilating the content. In this research, usability guidelines and heuristics, complemented with recommendations from educational video game studies, were gathered and analyzed for application to a video game for English language learning called EnLang4All, which was also developed in the scope of this project and evaluated in terms of its reception by users.

Keywords

• education
• video games
• serious games
• English language
• language learning
• second language