How Do Games Affect the Writing Skills of Young EFL Learners?

English and Turkish languages have different orthographies. The orthography of English is considered relatively deep since many English letters can correspond to more than one sound; many sounds can be represented by more than one letter and English has a number of consonant digraphs/clusters such as th, sh, ch, and ck to represent a single sound. Whereas, the Turkish orthography presents a good example of the total shallow orthography as each letter represents only one phoneme and each phoneme is represented by only one letter. This difference can be problematic for Turkish EFL learners during the writing activity. Therefore, the primary aim of this experimental study was to explore the effects of games on the development of the writing skills of primary school EFL learners. 42 primary school EFL students voluntarily participated in the study and they were grouped as control and experimental. The experimentation took 9 weeks and in the last week of the study both groups were given a dictation exercise to find out if any differences existed. The results demonstrated that games positively affect primary school EFL learners' writing skills and therefore it was recommended that games should be used during the teaching of writing skills in primary school EFL contexts.