Abstract:

These days young people tend to be fond of various single-player video games. Recently there has been a noticeable upsurge in the prestige and popularity of computer games. The industry keeps developing rapidly, and the consequences of this process are influencing almost all spheres of our everyday life, educational sphere included. As computer games provide countless opportunities for players to autonomously learn new things, in particular, languages, a strong need for a profound research on the correlation between the process of autonomous language learning and the role computer games can play in it has emerged. This need served the main incentive for the present work. The group of our research consisted of young people in the age rate from 17 up to 20 years old. They are all are the first, second and third year students of Russian state Universities. The choice of the Universities has been done due to the following criteria: linguistic and non-linguistic ones.

The authors investigate and describe the influence single-player video games have on players’ language learning autonomy. Such type of learning has become very popular in Russian Federation especially during COVID 19 pandemic.

The article has two main sections: theoretical and practical. The theoretical part reveals information on autonomous language learning and its main and most noticeable features. Data on video games’ development and the particular role they play in the process of language learning is provided. The authors also highlight the most distinct positive and negative features of language learning via video games. The practical part explains how playing video games can contribute to the development of listening abilities, knowledge of variegated grammatical constructions and lexical units, and the overall performance in real life situations requiring the usage of foreign language. The detailed analysis of the most noticeable linguistic features of such games as “The last of Us” and “Dragon Age: Inquisition” is also provided in this paper. The authors try to compare the development of listening abilities, knowledge of variegated grammatical constructions and lexical units, and the overall performance in real life situations of different research groups of students. The authors draw the conclusions that developing language learning autonomy can be very fruitful and necessary especially during such difficult times as COVID 19 pandemic. Besides the fact that for this purpose we can use computer games makes it easier and more attractive for young people.

Keywords:

Autonomous learning, foreign language learning, computer games, linguistic and non-linguistic Universities, single-player computer games.