October 2007 — Features
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On a Quest for English
Online role-playing games, which take players on explorations of medieval fantasy worlds, are showing the potential to be a powerful tool for ESL learning.
When Professor Edd
Schneider and game
designer Kai Zheng
suggested to attendees
gathered in San Francisco
last spring for the
annual Game Developers Conference that
massively multiplayer online role-playing
games, better known as MMORPGs,
could help Asian teens acquire English
language skills, the two men generated
considerable buzz. Their message threw a
spotlight on a relatively new area of investigation
in the evolving relationship
between education and computer games—
namely, whether an MMORPG might
serve as a pedagogical tool for students
learning English as a second language.
Schneider, an associate professor in the Department of Information & Communication Technology at The State University of New York (SUNY) at Potsdam, has been researching games and teaching game design and development for more than 10 years. Zheng, a student in the department, is a Chinese software developer who has written for videogame magazines in China.
In their presentation, Schneider and Zheng argued that the internationally popular MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) could be marketed more effectively in China, Korea, and Japan if it were run on English-as-a-second-language servers, which are accessible to players in Asia and the United States. Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of WoW, currently sells the Asian rights to the game to a Chinese company, which runs it on separate servers. Schneider believes that running the game on joint ESL servers could remove one of the greatest roadblocks to sales in that part of the world: parents.
"In China, parents hate computer games," Schneider says. "They want their kids to be studying or involved in sports. Most wouldn't even consider buying World of Warcraft. But Asian parents also want their kids to speak English. We suggested that if they knew their kids would be getting up at 7 a.m.—which is 7 p.m. here—to practice English [the game's default language], they would have less antipathy for the product. I really believe that if Blizzard started an ESL server of English in China, they would make a fortune."
Beyond marketing considerations, Schneider believes that MMORPGs have great potential as tools for ESL programs in US schools. It's a notion born of a project Schneider and Zheng worked on earlier this year, in which a group of SUNY Potsdam graduate students tutored a group of Chinese middle schoolers in English through online computers games. Employing a VoIP connection and Flagship Industries' group-communications program Ventrilo, the graduate students rose at 3 a.m. to interact with students at Shanghai's Qibao Middle School. Over the course of five months, Schneider's students played a range of games with the Qibao students, everything from online Scrabble to various strategy games.
"Basically, I told [my students] that they could teach them English using any game they wanted," Schneider says. "Once a week, all my students would get up in the middle of the night, put on their headsets, and chat for two hours with 12-year-olds in Shanghai. The Chinese kids absolutely loved it. Their teachers told us it was their favorite class."
