Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill
Description: Fluency in Play was written to provide K-16 teachers with an introduction to designing and building computer games for the foreign language classroom. At the heart of the book is the fact that computer games make excellent teaching tools. They combine two of the fundamental processes of new language acquisition—play and exploration—with the power and pleasures of fun. Computer games are also dynamic, scalable, and ductile; they can be drawn out and shaped to fit an infinite number of classroom sizes, subjects, and settings. Computer games are thus ideal for foreign language instruction, especially when that instruction involves less commonly taught languages, which are notorious for being difficult to learn quickly and efficiently at the intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency.
Fluency in Play is meant as both an introduction and a prompt, that is, as an overview of the process of educational computer game design and a provocation to language teachers excited about the pedagogical possibilities of that process. It is not hard to envision the interesting, ground-breaking, and useful strategic language games that a little elbow grease could produce, and we hope that Fluency in Play will serve as a guiding and animating force for teachers interested in that kind of production.
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Price: $7.50 for the electronic version; $10.04 for the paperback.