The development of serious games for language learning
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Language is the precise tool through which human beings communicate complex ideas about art, science, politics, and technology. Without it, there is no teamwork, no community, and no forward progress as a species. Through language, all human endeavour is possible. The only problem is that there are currently more than 7,000 living languages being spoken all over the world. That means that if you were to travel the globe you’d have a lot of opportunities to be in rooms where you won’t understand a single word spoken.
Consider how you were taught foreign languages at secondary school or high school. Learning the building blocks of a language from the age of 11 through your teenage years, where so much dramatic change is occurring, emotionally, physically, and hormonally. While the value of being bilingual or even multilingual is obvious as an adult, at school, especially to English speakers, it can for the most part prove to be a distraction from seemingly more pressing matters. How much French do most of your friends remember from your school days? Did many of your classmates go on to be fluent? Just you? Just the one who went on to be a language teacher?
Maybe serious games were the missing ingredient?
Can you learn a language by playing games?
In short, yes. There’s no substitute for growing up bilingual, as your mind is never more malleable and receptive to instruction than when it’s developing. However, serious games have proved to potentially be the next best thing. Serious games are games designed with a serious purpose other than pure entertainment. Serious games can be applied to almost any area when it comes to encouraging desired behaviours, developing skills, or animating a community. They can be used in corporate training, recruitment, fitness, communications, and for our purposes, language learning and education.
The rise of online language learning apps
Duolingo was launched in 2012, and the following year it was voted the number one free learning app on the Google Play Store. It offers free courses in over 30 languages, using various game mechanics to keep players motivated on their way to learning a new language. While it’s technically defined as a gamified language learning app, it’s a service that fundamentally takes gamified concepts and applies them to e-learning, and for the most part can be said to satisfy the definition of a serious game.
The Duolingo example can be looked at as a shining example in the history of serious games, as it proved a huge disruptor to more established old-school recreational language learning courses, or enrolling in night classes or distance learning, and spawned various imitators. Not only can learners move at their own pace through a course within gamified apps like Duolingo, Drops, and Memrise but they’re also kept engaged through positive reinforcement, such as protecting their streaks of achieving their daily learning targets.
How effective can online language learning games be?
While it might be sneered at by some as being more aimed at beginners, research has indicated that some Duolingo subscribers can perform as well on reading and listening tests as students who have completed 5 semesters of university studying the same language. The various language learning apps boast enough premium subscribers and glowing testimonials that serious online games focused on language acquisition, can be considered an effective learning tool when it comes to languages.
Consider then, that if most language learning apps are focused on the more general areas of language, be that basic conversation, or even for the social currency of being seen by peers to be doing something productive, what are the potential outcomes when similar techniques are applied in a more focused, educational setting? Where students not only have classroom time and a real-life foreign language teacher instead of 15 minutes here and there and an animated angry bird, but coupled with more curriculum-oriented language games, and a class of peers and required attendance safeguarding against lost streaks and the ebb and flow of motivation.
Language learning through gamified learning pathways
So to bring it back, what can you, as an educator, take from gamified examples to enliven your language teaching strategy?
The main advantage to incorporating online serious games into language learning is that you’re introducing a fresh and enticing opportunity for your students to practise. They’re not just repeating sentences, conjugating verbs for the sake of it, listening to recordings, or watching foreign films. They’re playing through interactive online experiences where they’re practising the language and as such, retaining more of it. A serious educational game uses gamification techniques, such as tapping into a players desire for challenge and their curiosity, in order to draw them into the game and achieve the desired learning outcomes.
Easily create your own language learning games
In the context of your classroom, a good gamification platform allows you to easily create more tailored online learning experiences utilising many of the same gaming techniques used by popular but more general online language learning platforms. The customisation allows you to make them more focused, and more curriculum-relevant, and a customised game will allow you collect data on how your students are performing – how often or frequently they’re playing, how far they’ve advanced, and get an indication of their proficiency, without the high pressure situation of a formal test.
For example, you could look to incorporate the Dynamic PathTM platform on Drimify to create a customised course of interactive learning modules. You could create levels out of the Quiz, and have the answers either as multiple choice or in an open format, depending on how challenging you wanted to make it. The questions could either be text, for reading skills, or even use video recordings to allow students to practise their listening skills.
The Dynamic PathTM format gives you access to every game engine in the Drimify catalogue, so you could mix the more traditional learning elements with mini games, but say, rédiger les instructions en Français, because as my French teachers were always so keen to keep telling us, “En Français uniquement.” While adding levels with the Crossword Puzzle or Word Search offer particular utility when teaching languages, pretty much all the mini games involve some language-based elements, so there are many different ways to keep your serious educational games fresh for your students, and to adjust the difficulty level to keep your students challenged, whatever their proficiency.
Help your students love language learning through the power of games
Serious games have proved themselves to be an effective learning tool when it comes to language learning, and really, this should never have been in doubt. The key to language education and acquisition is immersion, and nothing is more immersive or more engaging than playing a game.
Customising online serious games to help your students, be they school age or adult learners, gives them a flexible learning experience that can be played from any modern device – on a smartphone, on a tablet, or a laptop. You’re simply tapping into their natural curiosity and appetite for challenge to get them to practise what they’re learning in the classroom, while simultaneously monitoring their progress.
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