The Benefits of Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) on Indonesian High School Students’ Engagement in Learning English as Foreign Language (EFL)

The essay seeks to discuss how Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) offers some advantages for secondary school students’ Engagement in the EFL classroom in Indonesia. The essay also investigates some drawbacks confronted during DGBL implementation and provides the refutations to disprove the counterarguments. The methodology undertaken in this essay is literature review. Relevant literature was obtained through peer-reviewed articles from reliable journals such as Google Scholar, ERIC, ProQuest Education Journal and any other relevant sources. The findings further reveal that teaching EFL classroom under the framework of DGBL benefits students in three ways. Firstly, digital games can engage students’ emotion in the learning process by promoting a psychological state that is commonly known as a flow condition. It refers to play a digital game with fun, interest and deep concentration. Secondly, DGBL can engage students’ cognition by providing problem-solving activities which help students to think critically to decipher the challenges of the games. Lastly, DGBL can also promote behavioural engagement by situating students in cooperative learning activities which, with guidance from teachers, encourage students to participate collaboratively as teamwork during the gameplay. In this essay, whereas, the investigation only focuses on which aspects of DGBL can significantly leverage students’ engagement in EFL learning classroom. Therefore, further analysis is required to examine on how DGBL can be an effective instructional strategy to meet the English standard competences on Indonesian national curriculum (2013 Curriculum).