The Class of Us: A Study Across Several Schools in Sweden Comparing the EFL Comprehension of Playing the Video Game The Last of Us Versus Viewing the Television Adaptation

Sammanfattning: Contemporary English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms in upper secondary schools in Sweden make frequent use of receptive media such as movies and television to facilitate language learning. The more interactive medium of video games is seldom used for the same purpose, despite previous research indicating that the added layer of interactivity can bring benefits such as improvements to vocabulary, written production and reading comprehension. The field of educational video games research has previously focused on games designed with education in mind, and less on narrative experiences for the purpose of EFL learning. This study aims to make a direct contribution to this field by analyzing the results of a receptive comprehension test which students took after playing the prologue of the 2014 video game The Last of Us: Remastered. This result was then compared to a control group which took the same test after watching the 2023 television adaptation of the same narrative. Out of a possible maximum of 14 correct answers on the comprehension test, results show that the test group of 63 video game players yielded a marginally lower average of 10.79 compared to the 10.94 average for the control group of 63 television viewers. However, the two-tailed p-value of .688 indicates that one cannot reject the null hypothesis that this small difference is the result of pure chance. The large number of subjects and the data’s approximation to a normal distribution curve instead indicate that the video game can be as effective as the television series in an EFL comprehension context without any impact on the quality of comprehension. An attached attitudinal survey additionally shows that a large majority of respondents wish to see more video games in education. To build upon these results, future researchers are encouraged to bring narrative video games like The Last of Us even closer to the EFL classroom through action research or more longitudinal studies.