Your Time, Your Language

There are always various computer or mobile platform based games and tools for language learning. We have dictionary and translator apps galore (albeit, we are often warned by professors against using such translators).  But sometimes these ready made lessons on the fly are all we have the time for.  There are stay-at-home parents, full time employees and busy adults everywhere who either don't have the time or simply don't have the confidence to enroll in a semester of language study.  So is there any truly viable alternative?

I recently encountered the mobile app and computer based program Duolingo via a CNET article on best Android language apps.  I thought it was all very interesting but the blurb was incredibly brief and I have an iphone rather than Android phone.  However this program was brought to my attention again another day. I work part time at a bookstore and was assisting a woman who was looking for Spanish workbooks to try and retrieve her previously fluent Spanish skills.  She was perhaps around 50 years of age, well spoken and certainly did not seem to be even considering registering for college courses.  I mentioned to her I had read about Duolingo, but that I found it under an article for Android.  She then laughed and pulled out her iphone, on which she had the app.  Thus, I discovered it is also available for Apple platforms and that this somewhat elderly woman actually ventured to use the program. She continued to explain she uses it on her computer as well and very much enjoyed the program.

After this encounter I decided to look a little more seriously at this app. It seems hard to believe that a little time clicking through a game would improve Spanish skills to any serious degree, and particularly I was curious about how it could help someone who used to be fluent.

According to the study conducted in 2012, testing a sample of exactly half men and women and whose average age was 34.9 years, such a program does indeed exist.  Not only did a great majority of the subjects report favorable interest in the program during their use, but there were significant gains in Spanish knowledge.  Their progress was tested by looking at pre- and post-test scores on WebCAPE (Web Based Computer Adaptive Placement Exam).  This is the same sort of test used to place students into the appropriate level of language course at the university level.

Over a period of eight weeks using this program, students showed an average of 8.1 pt improvement per one hour of study on Duolingo.  The conclusion was that through 26-49 hours of study, one could theoretically progress to a level equivalent to that of one semester of college language coursework.  Considering that 55.3% of the participants were full-time employees, this alternative is a great relief as compared to an in-person course, which often requires students to meet four days a week for at least an hour.  Adding in the driving and parking time for these classes, costs of gas, supplies, textbooks etc. the mobile app alternative would be much welcomed.  Another interesting factor that significantly affected the results was the reason for studying. Although the majority were using the app for personal interest, it was instead those who studied for travel that showed the highest improvement.

I suppose here my only questions would be how this translates into speaking ability as the tests did not include an assessment of spoken proficiency, and any in-person classwork would provide and enhance that aspect. I also wonder why such a large gap (26-49 hours) to cite an "average" time needed to equate to one semester class.  Over a testing period of only 8 weeks, it seems a large range to conclude with.  Finally, although not necessarily a question, I agree with the research conclusion that recommends Duolingo include a clock to record hours spent in a week/month/etc. of time studying. A user may not realize that any hiatus taken due to busy schedules may be as long as it has, and any language teacher would agree that below a certain time (in the case of this study, 2 hours a week) the study would not help improve skills in any way.

Overall, I would say between this study, CNET reviews, and the nice woman at the bookstore, we can conclude that there is an option for self study that amounts to actual language improvement and one of this options would include Duolingo.

Learner Motivation in MMORPGs - Research Review

I had the wonderful opportunity this week to read an article by a fellow serious game advocate that will be published.  What was nearly as interesting as the article itself, was the timing of being able to read this just after my previous posting. I feel his research was actually very relevant to the concept of game attitudes and refocusing our attention on the needs they meet and the benefits provided by games toward learning.  Min Lun Wu's article is intriguing in several ways to a field of research that is still relatively new and emerging.  He and his team chose to study casual and non-gamers interests rather than the opinions of students who play regularly.  In looking at MMORPGs which often have a high learning curve and are intimidating to non-players, this is a step in the right direction toward understanding real-world implications of implementing these games.  Additionally, rather than jumping the gun and looking at vocabulary increases or actual effects of the game, it questions the very basis of why we should use them and attempts to empiricize the factors associated with this issue.  While effects are very important, I believe we have to fully explore the basic principles and reasoning involved in using games in order to work toward a truly digital learning environment in a world where traditional lessons still rule.

While my own work focused on sociocultural theory, his research isolated the motivations for games and how that may relate to learning.  This research is framed in self-determination theory and Yee's 10 subcomponents of motivation.  Both of these formats identify a need for autonomy, challenge, and socialization.  Upon concluding the findings of which aspects of motivation were provided by the game, Min Lun Wu's article also investigated what benefits toward language acquisition were actually perceived by the players.  The overlapping factor was the aspect of socialization and teamwork, and this is wherein lies the strongest benefit of games to learning, and especially in language learning. I have also identified a strong correlation between the social communities of games and the scaffolding effect required by sociocultural theory for learning. This is one of the major necessities for language learning, a need often unmet by traditional classrooms with an instructor-audience dynamic. Of course teachers attempt to provide an environment for interaction but in the real world, students are shy, nervous, anxious about their skills or how they will be perceived, and in all honesty they are only able to spend time practicing with other students of the language who may not even be able to provide the correction and feedback that is needed.

Games provide access to an entire world of native speakers of the target language, which is something that traditional classes will most likely never be able to provide.  This article will provide essential foundation to the world of serious games by empiriczing the issues often brought up only as theory. Of course research students as myself can say that theoretically, games have the assets that are deemed necessary by researchers and theorists on education. However, to utilize more than one framework on motivation, including those that have been applied to fields outside of education and allow non-gamers the opportunity to personally identify where they see benefit and value in games both as it relates to motivation theories as well as how they believe it does via open-ended questions allows us a very different sort of insight into the role games can play.

But: here are some questions as food for thought that I keep coming back to in reading any research on the matter.

1. What are the issues related to balancing the main benefit of MMORPGs, to me the huge player base which provides the scaffolding opportunities, with the extreme lack of player base in any language other than English?  Of course this is beneficial for ESL, but can it ever be extended to a large group of American language learners- students trying to meet foreign language requirements or learning languages for careers?

2. What is the true availability of these games?  Many such as World of Warcraft actually have a pretty steep expense of $15 a month after the first few levels, which for non-players may be just enough to discourage learners.

3. Is there room and is it worth it to customize content in the form of an MMORPG?  In addition to customizing for language or availability - what about the language that students actually encounter?  Many issues, as identified by Min Lun Wu, include archaic language (many of these games have a medieval theme and include archaic English terms), topics that are rather isolated to the game world (guild, ogre, warlock, etc.), and the issue of players avoiding communicative opportunities.  Sometimes due to an underdeveloped confidence in ability to play the game and complete quests, a player may avoid combat or competition in game and thus lose the opportunity to practice this sort of communication and the need to work in a team to accomplish said goals. While players often appreciate the ability to discover their world, walking around a forest and shooting at the wildlife for gold coins and increased mana will not provide the quality interaction that is necessary for language development. How do we ensure that the gameplay provides language content that is actually relevant for use outside the gaming realm?

4. Lastly there is the recurring issue of time.  Given the learning curve, character customization, load time - how valuable is game play as a learning tool? How do we contrast "one hour of game time" with the actual amount of time spent on interaction and thus time toward learning development?  What exactly is it we are testing these games for: use in the classroom, use in place of the classroom (in this case, where will game play occur and when?) or lastly, possibly only as a supplement to traditional classroom learning?  This will determine how beneficial/detrimental the use of games as it pertains to time will be and this is a question that is often avoided.

Overall, this article has definitely provided some very interesting facts and a new perspective on the use of games in language learning and I am very interested to see where it goes.  However, as all great research does, we are left with more questions to answer and I await the response to this call for future research.