Communicative 2.0 : video games and digital culture in the foreign language classroom

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006.I explore two core concepts in today's youth entertainment culture that will increasingly become central in future attempts to design affordable foreign language learning materials that hope to bridge the chasm between education and foreign popular culture. In the process, I outline a series of example applications that apply these concepts to developing rich foreign language materials -- starting with more experimental/long-term approaches such as using video game modding techniques to make language learning friendly video games and ending with more concrete, ready-to-go, applications like extending open source content management applications. The first concept I look at is that of "Remix culture." In short, Remix culture describes the way in which youth culture today more visibly orients itself around creating media by extracting component pieces from other people's media creations, then connecting them together to form something new. In the video game world this phenomena is more specifically termed 'modding.' In this process, amateur fans take a professional commercial game title and then modify it in creative ways that the original designers may not have considered.(cont.) Outside of video games, we see terms like "web 2.0" used to describe technologies that allow website viewers to play a role in authoring additions to the sites they are reading, or "mashups" where users use programming interfaces to rapidly create web content by mashing together pieces from different sources. The second emerging concept critical for curricular designers to follow is that of transmedia storytelling. Traditionally, one might assume a model in which distinct media forms are used to serve distinct cultural practices: television or novels tell stories, video games are for play, blogs for socializing and textbooks for learning. While initially this may have been the case, as each of the media forms above have evolved, they have expanded to cover multiple other cultural practices, often by extending across other media forms. By following the evolution of the interactions between these various media forms and activities within entertainment industries, we can find valuable insight when forecasting their possible interactions in the education industry.by Ravi Purushotma.S.M

Mobile Augmented Reality and Language-Related Episodes

Applications of locative media (e.g., place‐based mobile augmented reality [AR]) are used in various educational content areas and have been shown to provide learners with valuable opportunities for investigation‐based learning, location‐situated social and collaborative interaction, and embodied experience of place (Squire, 2009; Thorne & Hellermann, 2017; Zheng et al., 2018). Mobile locative media applications’ value for language learning, however, remains underinvestigated. To address this lacuna, this study employed the widely used construct of language‐related episodes (LREs; Swain & Lapkin, 1998) as a unit of analysis to investigate language learning through participation in a mobile AR game. Analysis of videorecorded interactions of four mixed‐proficiency groups of game players (two English language learners [ELLs] and one expert speaker of English [ESE] per group) indicates that LREs in this environment were focused on lexical items relevant to the AR tasks and physical locations. Informed by sociocultural theory and conversation analysis, the microgenesis of learners’ understanding and subsequent use of certain lexical items are indicated in the findings. This understanding of new lexical items was frequently facilitated by ESEs’ assistance and the surrounding physical environment. A strong goal orientation by both ESEs and ELLs was visible, providing implications for task‐based language teaching approaches

10 Key Principles for Designing Video Games for Foreign Language Learning

This paper was produced for the Open Language & Learning Games Project, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Education Arcade

Commentary: You're Not Studying, You're Just...

As often as language teachers lecture about the importance of continual practice to adolescent learners, the dullness of homework exercises designed primarily to be educational has difficulty competing with popular media designed solely to be entertaining. Recently, numerous attempts have been made to develop "edutainment" titles that seek to merge educational goals with entertainment content; oftentimes, however, they fail to achieve either goal and fall instead into niche markets. Rather than seeing entertainment-focused media forms as adversarial to educational content, educators should instead embrace them. This commentary examines how content originally designed for entertainment purposes can be modified to provide natural and context rich language learning environments, without sacrificing its entertainment value. First, I examine a modification to the number one selling video game The Simsthat intelligently combines game data from the English edition with data from editions of other languages to form a bilingual gaming environment. This exposes learners to abundant L2 vocabulary, yet still provides enough L1 support not to detract from the game. This principle is then extended to other applications such as music videos, typing tutors, and voice-navigated games. Finally, areas of otherwise wasted time are identified, such as waiting for Web pages to load or walking to class, with suggestions of how technology can facilitate language learning during these times