ENRICHING STUDENTS’ MASTERY OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY THROUGH DIGITAL GAMES

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of digital games of students’ achievement in English vocabulary. Specifically, the Vocabulary Spelling City App was employed for the study. The design of the study is classroom action research. The study was conducted in Prince Abubakar Audu university, Anyigba, Nigeria. The population of the study was the 200 level students of Education/English in the 2023/2024 academic session who were 138 in number. The study adopted the purposive sampling technique. All the 138 students (62 males and 76 females) were sampled for the study. The purposive sampling technique was adopted for the study. The instrument for data collection was a researcher-made University Students’ English Vocabulary Test (USEVT). The instrument was given to two experts in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Prince Abubakar Audu University, Anyigba for validation to ensure that they were appropriate for the topic and students' level of competency. They were also examined for face validity by an expert in test and measurement from the same university. The same test used as pre-test was reshuffled and used as post-test. The paired sample t-test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that Digital game, Vocabulary Spelling City (CSV), was very effective for teaching English vocabulary, and that gender is not a predictor of achievement with regard to the use of digital game in English vocabulary learning. Based on these findings, it was recommended, among others, that traditional classroom vocabulary instructions should be modified to provide contexts and examples directly applicable to the goals of vocabulary teaching using digital games, which may therefore promote a deeper understanding and retention of new concepts.