Extracting the Pedagogy: Using Games as Texts in the Language Classroom
Extracting the Pedagogy: Using Games as Texts in the Language Classroom
Extracting the Pedagogy: Using Games as Texts in the Language Classroom
By Alex Hogue
June 7, 2021
Summary
While these respective successes in History and Anthropology show promise for the further deep integration of games into college courses, games in the foreign language classroom tend to focus on creating structured language interactions with predetermined goals,4 or.
Relegating the usage of games in the FL classroom to "Test review days" reifies the mistaken conceptions that playing games in the classroom should be a fun reward after the "Real work" of meeting the unit's language goals is complete and that the games themselves do not intrinsically bring pedagogical potential to a FL class.
A much smaller pool of potential games can be created using both hard and soft criteria based on game length, target audience, theme, weight, downtime, age recommendation, and what the game offers in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and cultural pedagogy.
While the type of game, the age rating, and the weight offer concrete criteria to narrow down the pool of potential games, the most important, soft criteria for using games in the language classroom is whether the game has an easily explainable turn structure and an appropriate amount of player interaction.
Because the idea of games as texts is relatively new to academia in comparison with other media, adapting games to the classroom correctly means rethinking the ways games have been implemented previously.
While injecting existing game structures with new content to help students learn can be a useful pedagogical tool, teaching games as texts requires extracting the pedagogical potential already contained within the game.
Using games in the classroom this way puts the game, gameplay, and the social communication that it encourages at the center of the unit as students develop their vocabularies, their command of grammatical structures, their comfort in speaking, their cultural knowledge, and their critical thinking and strategizing skills.
Reference
Hogue, A. (2021, June 07). Analog game studies. Retrieved July 02, 2021, from https://analoggamestudies.org/2021/06/extracting-the-pedagogy-using-games-as-texts-in-the-language-classroom/