Abstract
This study aimed to determine the impact of playing online games on the vocabulary retention of the first year college education students in Granby Colleges of Science and Technology. It also aimed to investigate whether the playing habits in online games is a variable in the ability of the first year college education students in remembering, recalling and using English vocabulary words. Online games have become widely used among students thus, the purpose of this research is to discover its impact on language learning.
The design utilized in this study was quantitative descriptive-correlative research design. 133 first year college education students served as the respondents who answered a questionnaire. The data were analyzed with the use of frequency, percentage, weighted mean, Pearson correlation, t-test, and ANOVA.
Based on the result of the data, most of the student’s vocabulary retention were moderate to high. A lot of the respondents play online games less than one hour and the most widely played online game is Mobile Legends. While results showed a positive relationship of online gaming on vocabulary retention, the data was not statistically significant, however, it shows a significant difference when the respondents were classified based on their gender, program enrolled and frequency of playing online games.
The conclusion was that, although the findings shows that online games may somehow enhance the English vocabulary retention specifically on the remembering and recalling of the words but they do not directly improve vocabulary learning but online games are still to be used as secondary methods to improve language learning as long as they are played moderately.
