A great article on multilingual communication within a gaming environment

Thorne, S. L. & Black, R. W. (2007). New media literacies, online gaming, and language education. Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research, 8.

This paper examines second and foreign language uses within computer-mediated interaction. It conducts a case study of multilingual communication within a multi-user online gaming environment.

Thorne describes a multi-lingual intercultural dialogue between two gamers, Meme (American, a novice player) and Zomn (Ukranian, an experienced player). The dialogue was occuring in a popular online game - WoW. The findings suggest that:

(1) The communication was naturally occurring without constraining by the fabricated and instructed setting discourse;
(2) They mainly used English, but three languages (English, Russian, the Latin aphorism) were totally used. Meme asked for help from his Ukranian high school friend using AOL Instant Message about how to say something appropriate in Russian;

(3) The dialogue illustrated some language strategies used by both participants, including language-specific explicit corrections with a following encouraging softener, requesting for a comprehension check, and collaboratively assembled successful repair sentences;
(4) An enduring friendship has been established to continue not only the intra-game activity but also out-of-game social networks.

This case study is a good example to show how language learners improve their language proficiency skills and their interlanguage pragmatic competences, such as requesting for help, in an online gaming environment. Ellis (retrieved on March, 2008) indicates that the acquisition of linguistic-pragmatic competences plays an important role in performing well the “contextualized acts” in the social interaction.

On the other hand, Zomn freely expressed his Ukranian identity and he is proud of it. He said to Meme that “tell him (Meme’s Ukranian friend) u got an interpreter now :)”. As Murray (2005) has noted that identity is formed through interaction in the online context, which provides opportunities for positively expressing their identity, especially when they find the value of their home language use in the computer-mediated communication. In this case, Meme studies some Russian from his Ukranian friend, in order to build a better relationship with the experienced player – Zomn. Zomn found the value of the Russian language use in WoW and be proud of it. A good relationship has been established between Meme and Zomn.

In a follow-up conversation with Meme, he showed a strong interest in starting Russian language courses. And he also reported that one of his roommates had already begun to learn Chinese in order to more fully participate in Chinese language-mediated game play. From this perspective, MMOGs prompt the multilingual and multicultural communication all over the world, increasing positive mutlicultural attitudes of the participants. How wonderful!!!

ESL educators advocate affirming diversity in the classroom, celebrating multiple cultures and languages in the classroom (e.g., Schwarzer, 2003). This article shows the potentials of MMOGs in this aspect. The implication for ESL educators is that video games could be a successful approach to achieve the goals of affirming diversity.

However, the issue of teachers’ scaffolding and implementation strategies in affirming diversity in the online gaming environment hasn’t been discussed in this paper, which could be one opportunity for further research.

Although the analysis presented in the paper is only limited to one case of online in-game conversation, it’s still suggestive of multi-lingual intercultural communication that frequently occur on WoW and other MMOG gaming sites. I would like to try to play some MMOG game to gain personal experiences of this kind of multilingual and multicultural communication, to explore more on this issue.

References:

Ellis, R. Pragmatic aspects of learner language. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Retrieved on March, 2008, from http://zephyr.nsysu.edu.tw/sla_studygroup/SLA--index.files/record/0519_wang/Interlanguage%20Pragmatics.ppt#256,1,Pragmatic aspects of learner language.

Murray, D. E. (2005). Technologies for second language literacy. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25,188-201.

Schwarzer, D, Haywood, A.& Lorenzen (2003) Fostering multiliteracy in a linguistically diverse classroom. Language Arts, 8 (6).

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day

A snapshot from Larry Ferlazzo’s homepage

As said in my last posting, I found Larry’s work is very relevant and valuable to my research interest “gaming and ESL education”, so I was starting to search for more of his work. And I am very glad to find his WiKi space.

From the introduction of his WiKi, I know it includes nearly 8,000 categorized links appropriate for ESL learners. I was really impressed by that. Among these links, many of them are about e-gaming and language learning, such as Learning With Computers, The Tech Savvy Educator and learning games. There are a lot of useful information about gaming and language learning under these categories.

Larry has highlighted a lot of online games, giving brief descriptions of the games, and analyzing their advantages and disadvantages for language development. It gives ESL teachers, who want to integrate video games into their classrooms, a good guideline to choose appropriate ones.

And a more wonderful thing is that Larry put the games into different categories. For example, the game, Sim Sweatshop, fall into the category of “simulations”, “Intermediate language learners” and “social studies”. He describes Sim Sweatshop as a role-playing game in which “the player simulates being a worker in an overseas sweatshop producing sneakers for the American consumer”. He commented it as “an excellent tool to help teach about economics and justice”, so he put it under social studies as well.

The detailed categories of each game provide ESL teachers a much clearer guideline to choose an appropriate online game, in order to meet students’ different needs. Larry insists that the selection of a proper online game plays an essential role in achieving your specific educational goal, just like choosing a proper textbook in the traditional classroom. I like this point. Dipetro (2007) also indicates that the selection of the game is one of the major concerns in current pedagogy research areas. Although there is a lack of video games especially designed for ESL learners, as mentioned by Zhuo, Larry’s analysis and organization of the online games will definitely help ESL educators a lot, in increasing the language educational potentials of these commercial games.

There are not many resources on the area of gaming and language education, especially some experts’ WiKi space. Zhuo has posted Kyle Mawer’s Wiki space in her blog, and this one could be another valuable resource for the future exploration. And I would like to do more researches on how the genre of video games influence its implementation in the classroom.

References:
Dipietro, M., Ferdig, R. E., Boyer, J., & Black, E. W. (2007). Towards a framework for understanding electronic educational gaming. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 16(3), 225-248.

Free Online Games Develop ESL Students' Language Skills

Tech Learning is a good website that explores how to integrate technology into learning processes. It includes a lot of valuable resources, articles and news for teachers, tech coordinators and administors. When I searched for “gaming and ESL”, I found some good articles. One example is “Free Online Games Develop ESL Students' Language Skills”.

The author, Larry Ferlazzo, is an ESL high school teacher. He teaches English and Social Studies to ESL learners. And he is the Grand Prize winner of the 2007 International Reading Association Presidential Award for Reading and Technology.

In this article, he recommended a lot of online games, which “that are primarily designed for entertainment purposes towards an end of English-language development”. He divided these online games into several categories - escape the room, adventure, choose your own adventure, and hidden object. I'd like to explore these games later. The part I like in this article is that Larry has his criteria to choose online games for ESL educational purposes: 1) no sexual and violence content; 2) “must have a fair amount of English text shown and, ideally, spoken in the course of the game”; and 3) free and online, and not require any downloading, “as this can be problematic for school computers”.

Moreover, he designed many classroom activities, in order to use online games for language development purposes. For example, he asks his students to write down their own walkthroughs for the game they played; to discuss their playing experiences with each other.

AND he proposed a new idea to ask students to create their own online games on Sploder, a free website that students could quickly and easily design their own games. And then students could write the instructions on how to play the game they designed, play other games that have been created by their classmates, and give some comments.

Larry’s classroom is absolutely a good example of optimizing the use of video games for language development. I would like to explore more on Larry’s work later.

Reference:

Ferlazzo, L. (2008). Free online games develop ESL students' language skills. Tech Learning. Retrieved on March 24, 2008. Available from http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.php?articleID=196604915.

E-gaming and Education in China

Bringing technology into education is not a new topic in China. Chinese educators have realized the benefits of e-gaming in the educational contexts as well. While cruising the web, I found the first educational gaming website that was launched in Shanghai in 2005.

This website was designed by the East China Normal University Press and a Hong Kong communication corporation. The East China Normal University Press has a very good reputation in educational area in China. I guess almost every Chinese student from G1 to G12 must be very familiar with one educational reference book published by that Press, which is called “yikeyilian”(one lesson one practice). And this website is kind of Internet-based “yikeyilian”. If I were a student, I would definitely choose to enter into the intriguing Internet-based one, rather than the boring and dull paper-based one.

The website covers three subject matters (Chinese, Math and English) from grade 1-5. The middle school and high school versions are currently under development. There are almost 60 e-games to give students a platform to play and learn. I will introduce some of them:

"Daily Journey": It brings kids into various virtual worlds to learn content knowledge, like space travel and fairy world. The game is not only interesting, but also strongly linked to the content knowledge.

“Cool Knowledge”: It’s about some interesting daily knowledge, like an encyclopedia. Every week, they have different themes, such as language and biology.

"Journey Tracking System": It’s a student performance tracking system, keeping a track of the student’s “travelling history”. In this way, the student will be motivated to advance to higher level. Moreover, the student will have the sense of competition in this platform.

Every game really looks fun to me. If you want to know more, please visit http://e-legends.yikeyilian.com/index.php.

But, the system language is in Chinese. Sorry for the inconvenience for most of you. I hope someday there will be an English version. On one hand, this educational gaming website will be available to more English-speaking kids; on the other hand, for Chinese kids, they can have opportunities to learn English by Content Based Instruction (CBI), which is proven to be an effective teaching method by many researches (e.g., Davies, 2003).

Reference:
Davies, S. (2003). Content based instruction in EFL contexts. The Internet TESL Journal, IX (2). Available from http://iteslj.org/Articles/Davies-CBI.html.

Everquest Or Evercrack?

- Death of a game addict

Numerous researches demonstrate the motivating nature of video games in educational contexts, including in the second language acquisition area (e.g. Waters, 2007; & Cruz, 2007). However, does this kind of SUPER motivating nature have some side effects?

CBS News (2002) reported a sharp debate caused by a game – Everquest. It’s an online role-playing game in which players explore a fantasy world. This game has been recommended by many researchers for language learning, such as in the articles I reviewed in my previous posts (Waters, 2007; & Purushotma, 2005). Because of its addictive properties, players refer to Everquest as “Evercrack”. Purushotma (2005) reports that the average player spends over 20 hours a week playing Everquest. “There's no end to the game once you begin to play, unless you turn off the computer” (CBS News, 2002).

As we know, the amount of time is a key factor to influence language acquisition. From this point, Everquest is good. But after you listen to the following story, you might begin to blame this game. Shawn, a 21-year-old game addict, killed himself in front of the computer with Everquest. He had problems depression and schizoid personality disorder. So he spent as many as 12 hours a day playing the game for more than one year. His mom says "He stopped trying because it was easier to move on in the game than it was in real life; he logged into the game and logged out of him life”. And his mom believes “an addiction to Everquest pushed him over the edge”.

This story is so terrible. When I googled “Shawn, game addict”, I found numerous websites about this terrible story. If you want to know more details of this story, you can visit http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=31536.

It’s unfair to convict Everquest just according to one specific event, but this event did give us a big warning. Jay Parker, a chemical dependency counselor and co-founder of Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond, Wash., said “people who are isolated, prone to boredom, or lonely are much more susceptible to becoming addicted to online games. Having low self-esteem or poor body image are also important factors.” Parker’s words made me start to worry about our ESL kids.

Actually, researches (e.g., Norton, 2000) show that many ESL learners feel isolated and lonely; they don’t know who they are, what their identities are; they have low self-esteem or poor body image. According to Parker, they are just under the category of people “much more susceptible to becoming addicted to online games”.

In my last post, I commented that e-gaming environment is safe place to help ESL kids to forget the marginalization and“power imbalances” they can feel in the real world. They experience a new world and a new identity in the game, so that they can be more comfortable to acquire the English language. But now, I don’t know it’s good or bad. I am afraid that that kind of terrible story will happen on someone else someday.

What do you think of it?

References:
Cruz, J. Q. (2007). Video games and the ESL classroom. The Internet TESL Journal, XIII (3).

Everquest or Evercrack. ( 2002). CBS News. The Early Show. Retrieved on March 18, 2008, from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/28/earlyshow/living/caught/main510302.shtml.

Miller, S, A. (2002). Death of a game addict -Hudson man took own life after long hours on Web. JS online: News: Wisconsin. Retrieved on March 18, 2008, from http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=31536.

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity, and educational change. Essex, England: Longman.

Purushotma, R. (2005). Commentary: you’re not studying, you’re just… Language Learning & Technology. 9(1). P 80-96. Retrieved on March, 2008, from http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/default.html

Waters, J. K. (2007). On a quest for English. THE Journal, 34(10). 27-32. Available from http://thejournal.com/the/printarticle/?id=21380.

NEW Identity in MMORPGs

Identity has been always a key concept in language learning research. Many studies show that there is an inextricable connection between identity and second language acquisition (e.g., Amin, 1997; Norton, 2000). Norton（2000, p. 354）indicates that identity is "a site of struggle" for ESL learners. Through her two-year study involving five adult immigrant women in Canada, Norton found that learners are not always free to interact with native English speakers, because they can feel marginalization and “power imbalances” (p. 113). On the first day of their arrival in the United Stated, they were labeled as “ESL” and “minority groups”.

How to help ESL learners to build the satisfaction of their own identities? This is always a key concern for all ESL educators. After reading Waters’s (2007) article, I found that MMORPGs (massively multi-players online role-playing games) can provide absolutely wonderful environments to help deal with this hard issue.

Waters (2007) covers a number of studies on using MMORPGs in educational contexts, especially on their use in second language acquisition. Except talking about the motivating nature of e-games, like many other researches, Waters also indicates the aspect of New Identity built in MMORPGs. He says that one of the best things about MMORPGs for ESL learners is that MMORPGs provide them with the virtual worlds, in which the player could build a new identity to communicate with other players.

Dr. Gee, a professor of Curriculum and Instruction at UW-Madison says, “What’s particularly compelling about games is that they get you to be in a different, new world and be a different, new person, and that’s why little kids like them” (Johnson, 2003)

What are the benefits of building a new identity in the e-games? In the game, you are your avatar, nobody knows who you are and where you are. MMORPGs present a virtual environment with equal relations of participation, power and identity status. There are no "mainstream groups" or "minority groups". Skin coloring, ethnicity or culture are not important at all in the gaming worlds. I guess those ESL learners, who feel marginalized in the real world, at least can find one good place to feel comfortable and satisfied. If a person likes the environment around him/her, I think he/she will be more likely to have a positive attitude toward the language used in that environment. Language attitudes are found as a major factor in the second language acquisition and in the retention of second language skills (Gardner & Lambert, 1972).

On the other hand, the e-gaming environment provides players with a safe place to make mistakes. John Nordlinger, program manager for the Microsoft Research group, says "You aren't your avatar, you can use that avatar to make mistakes in a game without losing face. And that's a very good thing" (Waters, 2007). In other words, ESL learners will be more comfortable using English to communicate with others in virtual worlds than in real world (Murray, 2005).

All in all, MMOPRGs create a completely new virtual world, to help ESL kids temporarily forget their marginalized identity and power status. In this world, they have opportunities to acquire the second language with low-anxiety level and with huge motivation. What a marvelous world! But when they come back to the reality, they may still have to face the marginalization, or even worse, discrimination. How sad!

References:
Amin, N. (1997). Race and the identity of the nonnative ESL teacher. TESOL Quarterly, 31 (3).

Gardner, R.C., & Lambert, W.E. (1972). Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Johnson, A. (2003). The learning game - researchers study video gaming principles that apply to education. WIN News. Retrieved on March, 2008, from http://wistechnology.com/articles/243/?id=243.

Murray, D. E. (2005). Technologies for second language literacy. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25,188-201.

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity, and educational change. Essex, England: Longman.

Waters, J. K. (2007, October). On a quest for English. THE Journal, 34(10). 27-32. Available from http://thejournal.com/the/printarticle/?id=21380.

Sorry for the Chinese characters shown on my blog

Hi guys, sorry for the Chinese characters shown on my blog. I haven't realized that until now. Today, when I sit in front of the computer in my husband's office, to check my blog. I suddenly realized that not all computers can recognize the Chinese characters. I guess, except Zhuo, all others must see many wired symbols. I immediately changed the language setting. I hope it works now.

Sorry for the inconvenience :)

PLAY and FEED a Hungry Person

Today I found a very interesting and brilliant online vocabulary game which is called Free Rice. I don’t know if you’ve already heard about it, but I can not help recommending it to you. Free rice is sponsored by the U.N. World Food Program. If you get one word correctly, they will donate 20 grains of rice to the poor to help end hunger. The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names you see on the bottom of your vocabulary screen (see example shown in the picture above). As of today they have raised 22,478,677,910 grains of rice (see details here).

I really like this brilliant idea. Playing vocabulary game is associated with helping end hunger. What a big motivation! As we know, motivation is a key for success. I at once spent 5 minutes to try this game and I donated 380 grains of rice (see the picture above). It’s a small number, but I am very excited about it :). I decide to play more at my free time.

But, one problem is that, when I play this vocabulary game, it’s like doing the TOEFL test. I mean the vocabulary level is a little bit high for ESL learners, especially for beginning-level learners. I am wondering if Free Rice can add some levels particularly for ESL learners. If so, I believe our kids will spend an unexpected amount of time playing this game, to help the poor and to practice their English vocabulary at the same time.

Don’t wait. This game is fun and simply brilliant. Check-it-out here.

Article Review

Purushotma, R. (2005). Commentary: you’re not studying, you’re just… Language Learning & Technology. 9(1). P 80-96. Retrieved on March, 2008, from http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/default.html

This commentary examines how to use and modify entertainment-focused games for language learning. Purushotma discusses the educational advantages of many existing video gaming innovations, including The Sims, Everquest, Operator’s Side, etc. The author concludes that a successful language-learning video game should have the following properties: 1) the ability to easily edit international language files; 2) MMOG (massively multiplayer online games); and 3) speech interface.

In this commentary, Purushotma proposes the concept of “edutainment”, which means merging educational goals with entertainment content, by providing natural and rich contextual language learning environment into entertaining video games.
By doing that, learners are involving in a much more relevant, interactive, attractive and effective environment to acquire language than in the traditional teaching approaches.

There are many theoretical grounds to support learning language through gaming and simulation. For example, Al-Seghayer (2001) indicates that images and videos created for glossing reading passages can enhance incidental vocabulary acquisition better than can text-only glosses. Moreover, learners are able to guess the meaning of vocabulary in contextualized gaming environments. Huckin & Coady (1999) report that a gaming environment can provide learners with personally relevant tasks, thus highly motivating learners. In addition, Purushotma (2005) indicates that MMOGs provides learners to communicate with native L2 speakers from all over the planet.

The implication of this commentary is that the classroom teachers should bring new technologies, including gaming and simulation, into the language learning process, in order to motivate and facilitate their learning.

However, the author does not talk anything about teachers’ role in guiding learners to fully make use of the advantages of new technologies. Video games definitely will require more cognitive demands than traditional print-based texts, because of its multi-semiotic features, such as color, graphics, symbols and sounds, and because of the way to construct knowledge from a nonlinear, hypertext navigation. Therefore, researchers emphasize that the teacher needs to scaffold learners to develop these new skills, and support their progress toward autonomy (e.g., Murray, 2005). Although this seems to be beyond Purushotma’s focus, it might be another valuable area for other researchers to look at how teachers can facilitate students’ language learning in the gaming environments.

My other concerns are: what are the relationships between traditional classroom language teaching and this kind of new gaming language teaching? Is it OK to completely neglect the traditional classroom teaching? If not, how to balance these two approaches for language learning?”

References:
Al-Seghayer, K. (2001). The effect of multimedia annotation modes on L2 vocabulary acquisition: A comparative study. Language Learning & Technology, 5(1), 202-232. Retrieved March, 2008, from http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num1/alseghayer/

Huckin, T., & Coady, J. (1999) Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21(2), 181-193.

Murray, D. E. (2005). Technologies for second language literacy. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25,188-201.

Language Learning Via Video Gaming

Recently, I saw a piece of news that interests me. It's retrieved from

http://www.army.mil/-news/2007/01/22/1458-tilt-language-learning-via-video-gaming/

VINCENZA, Italy (Army News Service, Jan. 22, 2007)-
“The battlefield is going virtual”. Soldiers in Vincenza, Italy are provided a simulation video game to learn the Iraqi language – Arabic. This video game has “animated characters and life-like simulations that emphasize missions they'll conduct downrange”. In the tactical Iraqi language and culture training (TILT), there is no instructor and soldiers could learn at their own pace. TILT players are given voice-activated commands and they will get immediate feedback and guidance on Arabic language and culture learning. Soldiers are highly motivated to learn Arabic and they learn fast, “they've already spoken Arabic face-to-face with Iraqis on Baghdad streets”.

The battlefield is going virtual. Petty Officer Joe Ebalo tells us how Soldiers in Vicenza, Italy, are using a video game for more than just
recreational use. Photo by AFN Europe


I don’t want to comment on the influence of TILT from the perspectives of military affairs and politics, but, TILT is a really successful foreign language learning program through gaming and simulation. This video game creates a “virtual” Iraqis, which is strongly related to soldiers’ lives and interests, thus increasing their autonomy and motivation. New London Group emphasizes the motivation in learning, stating “people do not learn anything unless they are motivated and believe they will be able to use and function with what they are learning some way that is in their interest” (New London Group, 1996). Therefore, simulation is absolutely a good way to motive students and provide an authentic environment for them to acquire language and enhance learning.

Reference:
New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.

The topic of my blog

My study interest is on digital gaming and language learning. Digital gaming is becoming a powerful tool in all academic fields. At the same time, ESL/EFL teachers have also begun to think how computer games, such as The Sim, could shift the way we approach language teaching and learning. Therefore, my blog focuses on how digital games become an effective way of acquiring a second/foreign language.