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English is a language spoken and written by many people worldwide (The Malaysian Times, 2012). English can be regarded as the most commonly used foreign language (Naved, 2015). Accordingly, the language has been maintained as a compulsory second language in public schools in Malaysia since independence in 1957 (Selvaratnam, 2018). From preschool to tertiary level, Malaysian students have an average of 11 to 13 years of formal English language education (Azman, 2016).
Despite the policy, the public education system in the last forty years has been let down by a low level of English teaching, which has resulted in the generations of students leaving the education system with poor competency in English (Selvaratnam, 2018). Only 28% of students achieved a minimum credit in the 2011 Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) English paper against Cambridge 1119 standard (Rusli, Yunus, & Hashim, 2018). It should also be noted that poor command of English among Malaysian university graduates is one of the reasons behind the high unemployment rate among graduates in Malaysia. According to Aruna (2011), stakeholders in private sectors pointed out that Malaysian graduates do not have the necessary language and communication skills for workplace communication.
One of the root causes behind the students' poor English command is the lack of qualified teaching staff. According to a report from Free Malaysia Today (2018), there is a severe shortage of English Language teachers. Similarly, Jindathai (2015) pointed out that the management in teaching and learning English is the reason behind low English proficiency among university students. The administration of the English language teaching was inferior as the teaching staff were not of the presumed quality (Mosha, 2014).
Learning games used in the educational environment has been growing remarkably. There has been a substantial increase in recent years in using digital games for language learning (Godwin-Jones, 2014). Digital games are no longer considered as just an entertaining pastime. A growing number of researches are identifying games as effective tools for modern-day teaching, learning, and assessment (Schaaf & Engel, 2018). In recent decades, digital games are used as a form of new media with massive potential for learning the English Language (Yang, Lin, & Chen, 2018). According to Yusny and Fitri (2013), the emergence of today’s digital age has motivated scientists and experts to develop new methods to learn English.
The potential of digital games in attracting the learners’ attention has inspired the researchers to explore further the possibility of integrating digital games with an educational purpose (Sahrir & Alias, 2011). Past research unanimously stated that digital games have a significant role in the affective aspect of language learning. A quick systematic search, with the keywords of ‘digital games’, ‘language learning’ and ‘Malaysia’ on the Google Scholar for the duration of 2017 until 2021, turned up an interesting discovery. There are several review articles by Xu, Chen, Eutsler, Geng & Koguy (2019); Jassim & Dzakiri (2019); Ahmad, Mansor, Rashid, Ain, Zakaria & Sung (2021); Wu, Zhang & Wan (2020) and Wong & Ghavifekr (2018). These review articles unanimously focused on the determinants of, and/or challenges encountered during pre-adoption and adoption of digital games in learning a language. An exception can be given to Wong & Ghavifekr (2018) review, which focused on the problems and user experience related to learning history through digital games.