The effect of media habits on English proficiency: A study of L1 Norwegian teenagers

Abstract

This thesis compares the media habits of 86 Norwegian youth with their English proficiency. The goal is to investigate how much English we learn by e.g. watching TV, playing video games or listening to music. The 86 participants were between 16 and 20 years old, and answered a survey where they specified the number of hours they spent on an average day on each type of media. After this, they took an English proficiency test. The results from the test was then compared with the number of hours they spent on media in order to find a correlation. The results show that there is a positive correlation between the English proficiency test score and communicating while playing video games. There is also a positive correlation between test score and reading English books. A few other smaller correlations were found, but these were mostly only for girls. There were 49 boys and only 37 girls included in the study, which might have caused the results for girls to be more unreliable. No other clear correlations were found, and the main hypothesis was not confirmed. There are likely many factors unaccounted for which affected the results and gave unreliable data. One of these factors might be the age of the participant, because media habits could have a greater effect on English learning at younger ages. Also, comparing English proficiency with proficiency in other subjects must be done to discover correlations in case media habits bring down overall academic performance except in English. Thus, for further research, I suggest studying younger children, while also including other subjects in school.