The Engineer: enhancing bachelor students’ English technical engineering vocabulary proficiency with a serious video game

Abstract

Since the decade of 2010, the game-based approach has given rise to new research in education. The quick advance of technology has also helped to introduce more powerful and sophisticated devices and digital applications in the classroom. As a result, gamifying a subject with serious video games is a new rising trend in the educational sector. Therefore, this research is based on the use of a serious video game that has been developed with institutional support and it aims to reinforce a university bachelor’s degree subject.  The Engineer is a serious game designed to teach English for engineering and gives support to a textbook for the subject English B2 for Industrial Engineers at the Universitat Politècnica de València. This research aimed to measure the learners’ retention of new engineering vocabulary in English after using the game and the associated textbook. In our experiment, 64 Industrial Engineering degree students were divided into an experimental group that used the game and textbook and a control group that only used the textbook. Both groups took a pre-test and a post-test to measure their knowledge of general and specific engineering vocabulary. Results showed that the use of the serious game increased the exposure time to the foreign language, leading to better results among the experimental group. Students in the experimental group also showed more satisfaction with the course. The study concludes that serious games can be an effective tool for language learning and teaching as it extends the time of exposure to the new content and it also motivates the students due to its playful component.

Keywords: The Engineer, serious video games, gamification, game-based
learning, teaching english as a foreign language, language for specific purposes,
industrial engineering