Gamify Your Language

As an ESL teacher, I always tried to make learning as engaging as possible. When I was an English tutor in a juku in Japan, I had to come up with innovative ways for the students (both kid and adult) to engage with the learning. For the kids, it was a lot of games. Their favorite was slipper slide. I would set up their vocab words on the floor propped against an old white board tray stacked on top of tissue boxes. Then the students would use their indoor slippers (which were vinyl and very slick) to slide across the floor and hit the vocab word I would call out. Whichever student hit the word would make the sentence of the month, and we would reset. Did my game teach the students fluent English? No, of course not. But it did create a positive space where they enjoyed learning the content which would provide a solid basis for keeping it in their long-term memory.

 The goal of these games is to support the learning process. By making language acquisition somewhat competitive, with a dose of instant gratification, the tedious part of committing rules and collocations to memory can become more automatic, allowing the brain to focus more on using that English for critical thinking and better communication.

 Companies have known the benefits of gamification theory for a long time. Apps like Duolingo use leveling to help with practicing language. While the promises of learning the language solely by using the app is a stretch at best, it does help keep the learner engaged in the language during the hard beginner stages where quitting is most likely to occur.

 Games like Gramatic! or my in-development reading game Snapworld offer a chance for learning to be engaging long enough for students to get past the breakers and become self-motivating. Who said learning couldn’t be any fun?