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?

MtG: or How I Learned to Learn

When I was a kid, I got heavily into the trading card game Magic: the Gathering (MtG). The fantasy aesthetic, the competition, the collection aspect, the community you built with your friends, all made the game very addictive. But beyond the fun, MtG also helped me develop my language skills and provided critical thinking and problem solving that was difficult to get from my school courses because those were boring and gave little instant gratification. In other words, I was more interested in playing my games than practicing or studying or even engaging in schoolwork.

 Then, in my freshman year of high school, my Language Arts teacher made a deal with the class. Every week, we would have a spelling/vocabulary test. Usually, I did relatively poorly on those because the words were hard and I didn’t study. But, the teacher agreed that if a student brought in an outside source that had a word from the vocab list, she would give us an extra half a point of credit on the next quiz. I soon realized that most of the words on the vocab list were used in MtG in some form or another, either in the card names, or descriptions, or even the flavor text. For the rest of the year, I received an average of 110% on my spelling quizzes, not only because I found the vocab words in my game, but in so doing, it helped commit those words to my long-term memory (I will always remember the word “cache,” from the MtG card Eleven Cache, as the first vocab word I came across in the wild).

 I have a story-telling box full of these anecdotes: how games have helped my or other’s learning in some form or another. I hope to share those stories here in this blog while at the same time producing and publishing my ESL and literacy games. As an ESL teacher for over 15 years, I have made countless games and activities that do not replace other forms and methods of teaching language, but supports learning by strengthening engagement, community, and interest. I want to share these games with the teaching community and support the growth and learning of students in a way that is safe, fun, and, of course, educational.

 Here’s to the start of my new journey. Thank you for reading this far! If you are an educator, what are some memories you have of games teaching you more than just to have fun? Please sign up in our email list so that you can get notifications whenever I post a new blog entry. Happy. Friday!