Types of game and language skills

In this article, I will be reflecting on my students’ “choose a game” language class. This class is the third week of a 7-week course which utilises board games as the main teaching tool in a low-level EFL context. The previous week students chose a game to play and for homework they were tasked with learning the rules to the game. My reflections come after I have made the context clear.

The situation

It’s no secret that I teach fairly low-level learners. My students are first and second year Japanese university students who are majoring in broad subjects such as architecture and civil engineering (known as RG), computer science, graphic design and systems administration (RD), electrical and mechanic engineering (RT), and physics (RU). They share one thing: they are studying towards a Bachelor of Science (BSc.) degree. Oh wait, one more thing in common: a hate of English. Well, maybe not a hate, and maybe not all of them. Yes, I am being a bit harsh, but needless to say, they are at least not choosing to study English. It is a required course for them to put up with me for once a week each of the 30 weeks in the two semesters.

Why games?

I use games as a primary teaching tool. I only started this year, but have been dabbling with the concept for the last three. One Night Werewolf here, Two Rooms and a Boom there.

(Source: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1505726_md.jpg )

It wasn’t until I met the delightful @jonathandehaan earlier this year that things really started to change. Speaking from my own perspective (although I know Jonathan has similar views) I was deeply interested in the application of video games and online worlds as a teaching tool. That’s where the whole concept of Kotoba Miners came from. However, I’m not going to go too deeply into the development, growth, and evolution of that particular project.

There were just a few issues niggling in the back of my mind that stopped me (prevented me) from going full steam ahead with the adoption of video games as a general teaching tool. This word general is important. General means “every day” for me, and my daily situation is a class of low-level, mostly-uninterested-in-English Japanese university students.

So why aren’t video games applicable in your day-to-day teaching James?

1. Cost
2. Space
3. Technology ineptness
4. Lack of genuine communication

The first two are understandable without further explanation, but 3. is based on my experience of sitting students down in front of something like Minecraft and them a) feeling sick after 15 minutes or b) being utterly bewildered behind the concept of WASD for movement. Another quite remarkable incident was when students had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned a URL. “Just google it” they said. So this:

www.reddit.com/r/EFLcomics

became

reddit EFL comics

Anyway, I’m getting off track and a little too condescending of the “digital natives.”

Number 4 is my own personal belief (which I am hopefully going to prove with my PhD research) that the introduction of a screen between two people (in other words “computer mediated communication”) is not as beneficial as face-to-face communication. Especially in a monolingual, low-level EFL context.

So back to: “Why games?”

(…but this time with a focus on board games)

Board games (as you’ll hopefully be persuaded into believing) offer a great deal of benefit for language learning. More so than even video games. I’m writing a paper on this topic, and (again) won’t go into much detail on this topic here, bur suffice it to say that they tick all of the boxes where video games fell down for me:

1. Cost — cheap!
2. Space — easily stored!
3. Technology ineptness — no tech!
4. Lack of genuine communication — 100% genuine!

Other quick mentions of benefits:

• The rulebook: Prime students for play in every conceivable way.
• Player-directed play: Sociocultural learning at its finest. All the breakdowns in communication a man could wish for.
• Experiential learning: Learn by doing, no predetermined linguistic goals here!
• Variety of potential experiences: Not another Final Fantasy?! Nah, let’s play Camel Up! instead.
• Physical, tangible components: W, A, S, or D not required to move knight into lava-death pit.

Game type, struggles and potential

OK, we are back to the main point.

During class today, I was able to see the following games all taking place at the same time. There were more than just these three, but I am focusing on these as I think there is a great deal to be learned (at least for myself) from analysing what occurred.

I want to focus on their oral production (or spoken performance, however you want to call it) during game play.

Forbidden Island

This group started out speaking a lot of Japanese as they confirmed rules, and made sure everyone was on the same page. I thought they would stop, but no, they were in the swing of talking Japanese, and so they carried on for the remainder of the game….

However!

They actually finished the game during class time, really enjoyed it and after completing their reflection worksheets (damn, I haven’t even mentioned the reflection worksheets yet….) they wanted to play again. As part of their reflection though, they have to answer this question:

What is a rule that you would change or add to this game to make you speak more English?

And they came up with this change:

If I speak Japanese, the water rises.

Now, if you know this game, you’ll already be smiling (I hope). “Waters Rise” is the worst card to draw in the game and really ruins your chance of being actually finishing successfully. So, I let them play again for the remaining 15 minutes of class time with this additional rule. And guess what: it worked perfectly. But more importantly: Why did it work perfectly? Well, there are number of conceivable reasons why it worked so well.

• They didn’t want to lose (obviously).
• They learnt how to play the game the first time. Now they were armed with this knowledge, they had much more room for thinking about language skills instead.
• They were motivated to play the game with their own customised rule.

All of these points are really important. From a task-based language learning perspective, we know that task repetition is beneficial for improving players fluency and accuracy. Additionally, by having the rules salient in their minds, the cognitive demands become reduced. Finally, by giving them agency over how they play the game, their motivation goes up.

Moving on…

One Night Werewolf

First game: A fair amount of Japanese.

Second game (after I told them to reflect on what they had been saying in Japanese and thinking about how to say it in English): Much better. A decent amount of the game carried out in English.

Third Game: As per second game.

The key take away from this is that reflecting on what they wanted to say but couldn’t helped them with subsequent play sessions. Also known as debriefing, it is vital that students connect their reality with game play looking for gaps in their linguistic knowledge, and to reflect on the actions of others and how that led to the result they experienced.

Munchkin

Similar to the Forbidden Island group in that they started out speaking lots of Japanese to set up the game and talk about the rules. Then they had a lot of trouble in deciphering what each card meant (as their is a lot of text on the cards) so, of course, lots more Japanese spoken here, too. They continued to use Japanese as the main language of negotiation and rarely spoke English throughout the whole game.

But it isn’t all bad.

Munchkin also has a high barrier for my students to start playing. The cards really are a large step up for them in terms of the linguistic complexity that they are usually exposed too:

(Source: http://www.worldofmunchkin.com/faunandgames/img/cards.jpg)

I could see them working hard trying to understand what each card meant and how it interacted with other cards. There wasn’t a single Japanese cheat sheet or rule book in sight, so they had to refer to everything in English. In other words, I feel like today was the first time they actually used anything written in English for authentic purposes (let’s not go down the “define authentic” rabbit hole), and I could see it in their faces that they were genuinely proud of themselves for being able to figure out how to play and what the effect of certain cards were.

Although I have no formal data to back up any of the claims I am making above, it is with this last Munchkin group that I felt a glimmer of pride for developing this way of teaching English. During play, they said (in Japanese, but still, bear with me)

It’s not that hard to understand once you get used to it.

And then

Let’s play again next week.

To which I replied:

That’s a great idea. This week you did a brilliant job learning the game, and understanding the text on the cards, but next week, wouldn’t it be great if you could play in English, too?

And so, they all instantly understood what my aim was in bringing games into the classroom. For homework, this group is (compared to the other groups that have to learn a new game’s rules) tasked with writing down words and phrases that they think they will need to continue their play session next week.

Slowly but surely I am working on developing this way of teaching, and am actually enjoying going to class for a change. Instead of groaning about “that shitty activity in the shittier textbook that comes up once a year,” I can see monolingual students learning and using English for a real purpose: enjoying themselves.

Originally published at blog.kotobaminers.org.