Commentary: you're not studying, you're just ...

ABSTRACT

As often as language teachers lecture about the importance of continual practice to adolescent learners, the dullness of homework exercises designed primarily to be educational has difficulty competing with popular media designed solely to be entertaining. Recently, numerous attempts have been made to develop "edutainment" titles that seek to merge educational goals with entertainment content; oftentimes, however, they fail to achieve either goal and fall instead into niche markets.

Rather than seeing entertainment-focused media forms as adversarial to educational content, educators should instead embrace them. This commentary examines how content originally designed for entertainment purposes can be modified to provide natural and context rich language learning environments, without sacrificing its entertainment value. First, I examine a modification to the number one selling video game The Sims that intelligently combines game data from the English edition with data from editions of other languages to form a bilingual gaming environment. This exposes learners to abundant L2 vocabulary, yet still provides enough L1 support not to detract from the game. This principle is then extended to other applications such as music videos, typing tutors, and voice-navigated games. Finally, areas of otherwise wasted time are identified, such as waiting for Web pages to load or walking to class, with suggestions of how technology can facilitate language learning during these times.

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In a single week, I met five people each claiming to be the world's worst language learner. Having legitimately claimed this title for myself long ago, it's obvious they were only exaggerating. Still, in listening to their various language learning histories, it seems we all reached this conclusion from similar experiences: Frustration with our old high school workbooks, a sense of helplessness when confronted with lists of isolated vocabulary to memorize, and little connection between assignments and our everyday life. While changes in classroom environments over the past century have allowed in-class learning to evolve considerably, the guidance students receive on how to continue learning a language outside of class has remained relatively the same. In general, beginning students are advised to set aside dedicated study time for completing practice exercises and to rehearse vocabulary items with techniques such as flashcards. However, as the current dot-com generation grows up submerged in captivating and dynamic media forms, educators will likely need to adapt their conceptions of homework to match if they wish to capture the interests of adolescent students. While recently numerous suggestions have been advanced for enlivening the language learning experience with interactive activities and online collaboration (e.g., LeLoup & Ponterio, 2003), much of the potential for the integration of entertainment media with mainstream language learning remains untapped--something that would have been pivotal for my own early language learning experiences.

Finding my high school German homework assignments frustrating and dull, I rarely managed to complete assignments. Naturally, as the course progressed it became increasingly difficult for me to remain an active participant in class--in turn, making homework assignments yet more frustrating. At the end of the year, I left the course with only two things: an ability to irritate my teacher enough never to be called upon in class and an "F" in German 1. It was at this time I dubbed myself "the world's worst language learner" and publicly declared that I was well satisfied with my monolingual status, with full intentions of keeping it throughout my life.

Fortunately, the Internet later provided a perspective on foreign language and culture considerably more appealing than the one I received in ninth grade. Far from the German "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain" we used to open each morning, sites like audioscrobbler connected me to modern commercial songs by analyzing youth in Germany with the same musical tastes. Rather than spending my free time on "find the conjugated form" word-search puzzles, I practiced contextualized conversation and grammar by loading learning materials found on the Internet into my cell phone and listening to them in my spare time while walking between classes. Surprised and encouraged by how much I learned from such a simple system, I enrolled in further German study and set about developing more complex ways of using technology to increase my foreign language exposure in practical and entertaining contexts.

YOU'RE NOT STUDYING, YOU'RE JUST PLAYING THAT SIMS[TM] GAME OF YOURS

For many adolescent language learners, the suggestion of playing an edutainment software title unfortunately conjures up images of simplistic space invader games, re-programmed to solicit foreign language vocabulary before being able to be able to shoot at a screen of sketchily drawn aliens. For students in a class only because of a mandated requirement, the temptation to forego all educational value for a modern software title instead designed solely to be entertaining is far too enticing. Upon a closer look, however, some of these same entertainment-focused titles possess much of the basic content desired in an educational title. For example, if we look at the number one selling game (Croal, 2003) The Sims, we see a lot of the same content one might find in an introductory language textbook.

The Sims is a game designed to simulate normal everyday life. Players control the daily routines of a virtual family, guiding them through tasks such as managing personal hygiene, cooking food, finding jobs, entertaining guests, and so forth. After assigning professions to their characters, players then manage the family finances, deciding how to best purchase furniture and appliances to develop their house based on analysis of the emotional states of their characters. In playing the English version of the game, I noticed the vocabulary for the tasks contained many of the same words as the German homework I should have been studying instead. Finding that the language of the game could be changed to German simply by switching a single registry setting, I placed a laptop with a translation tool beside my main computer and continued playing the game in German. When the vocabulary items then came up in class, I was already familiar with them and could recall the relevant associated contexts and animations used in the game.

While there have already been numerous suggestions for using commercial simulation games as language learning contexts (see, e.g., Coleman, 2002), most are based on designing external activities without modifying the games themselves. Traditionally, modifying a commercial game's interface or language data was an impossible task, as its programming was often locked away in compiled binary code. Today, however, most game designers separate game data into external files and actively encourage third-party customizations. For games like The Sims, this has led to an explosion of enhancements for the entertainment value of the game, though so far little has been done to take advantage of this customizability for educational extensions. One freely available customization tool provides users with direct access to the language data used in the game. By using macros, or scripts, educators can rapidly extract the parts of the first language (L1) game data they feel necessary for scaffolding learners and then integrate them as available translations within the second language (L2) version of the game (see Figure 1).

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In Figure 1 we can see an edit in which the main interface uses data from the German version of the game, yet includes tool tip data from the English dataset, so that if a player does not know a German word such as "Kochen," s/he can leave the cursor over the word and receive a pop-up explanation which includes an English translation. Also, enough keywords are glossed for the prompt "Do you wish to save before quitting" (literally: "Wants you save, before you the game quit?") to ensure a player would not get frustrated trying to understand, but makes it likely they will first read in the L2.

This method of modifying video games offers a powerful vehicle for further exploring recent work on incidental learning. Hulstijn (1992), suggests that vocabulary retention can be improved if new words are glossed with multiple choices in which the learner must then decide the most appropriate choice (Figure 2).

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Unfortunately, in a traditional reading environment this can have adverse effects for both reading comprehension and vocabulary retention if learners make the wrong choices (Watanabe, 1997). In a video game, however, some incorrect assumptions by learners can be recovered through the interactions present in a typical gaming environment. For example, one of the variables players must keep track of is their Sim's energy level--represented in the German version by a bar labeled "energie." If a poor learner were to guess the meaning of this word incorrectly, her/his character would take steps to notify the player until the energy variable was addressed: First, the character would act sleepy and think about beds (Figure 3).

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If the learner still failed to recognize and improve the Sim's energy level, the game would take control and show the learner how by having the Sim fall asleep on the spot (Figure 4).

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