Abstract

This research aims to investigate the use of edutainment in developing Iraqi EFL preparatory school students' performance in listening comprehension. This study shows edutainment tools impact on improving students’ understanding of English listening comprehension. In English language teaching, it is impossible to control students' comprehension and boredom as they are concrete, but using various techniques in different times can eliminate boredom in any way. Thus, students can receive information due to the environment they are surrounded. Combining fun to education can serve students with benefits of improving learners' language skills. Edutainment can be employed for all language learning skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing).

In this study, the participants were randomly selected and divided into two groups; experiment and control groups. The experiment group consists of (31) students taught in the light of edutainment strategy to develop their performance in listening comprehension whereas the control group consists of (30) students taught listening comprehension by means of the prescribed techniques in the text book ‘English for Iraq’. In order to measure the students' understanding, the present study has used Google Classroom (GC) platform as an educational platform to assist students during their learning process of the course. Pre-test, post-test and a checklist are adopted in the study. The sample of the study comprises (61) students, selected from Al-Kindi preparatory school in Iraq. The study shows that the use of edutainment has a positive effect on the students' performance in listening comprehension.

Key words: Edutainment, listening comprehension, computer games, applications, multimedia.