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.