Playing Video Games Is the Best Way to Learn English, Study Says

Apparently, playing massively multiplayer online video games is the best way to learn English, according to a new report.

The study comes from the University of Gothenburg and Karlstad University in Sweden, who looked at a group of sixth-grade students and followed their online interactions, analyzing their use of the English language outside standard educational situations.

What the study reveals is that among the students, the ones who regularly play English language games gain a significant vocabulary advantage compared to those who do not play at all or play for limited amounts of time.

The greatest advantage was found to be for students who regularly enjoy MMOs, for a very obvious reason: multiplayer games encourage and sometimes require communication between players, and English is the go-to language of online interaction.

“As a player you simply have to be able to understand what’s being said, to read English and to interact yourself by both writing and speaking English,” said Liss Kerstin Sylvén, who worked on the study, called “Focus on Young L2 English Learners in Sweden” and published in ReCall, the journal of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning.

This makes a lot of sense, since most video games, and role-playing games in particular, often expose players to lengthy text blurbs that they have to decipher in order to progress.