Project Directors: Jonathon Reinhardt (University of Arizona) and Julie Sykes (University of New Mexico)
Digital games are socio-cultural practices and products, and gaming has become a mainstream, global cultural force. Applied linguists and FL educators have noted that gameplay is mediated by language use and social interaction, thereby also making it a potentially rich context for language acquisition. Off-the-shelf and online digital games are produced by a diversity of countries in a variety of languages.
Despite the interest in and availability of these games, ways in which their benefits can be harnessed to enhance FL learning have yet to be fully explored.
The primary goal of this project is to provide FL educators the resources (both material and pedagogical) needed to design, implement, and assess digital game-mediated learning activities that have the potential to develop FL multiliteracies. Over the course of the four year grant cycle, the project will produce and offer:
- classroom materials for L2 learning activities to be used with widely available vernacular digital games in Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
- white papers and academic-level working papers on issues related to digital game-mediated L2 teaching and learning
- a manual for L2 teachers and education professionals on evaluating, designing, and implementing game-enhanced L2 learning activities
- summer workshops on digital game-mediated L2 pedagogy
- a conference in Spring 2014, Playing Languages: Digital Gaming in FL Education, A Hybrid Conference on Research and Practice
More information about the project is available at the Games to Teach project blog.
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