October 2007 — Features
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On a Quest for English
Gooch, who is currently an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, cites another factor: "We know that learning is accelerated if we have an emotional response to the learning. We believe that's what might be going on in the game. I want to defeat an opponent. I'm worried, I'm scared, I'm excited—I'm interested. You tend to remember things that strike you this way."
Perhaps the most important difference between EQ2 and WoW as tools for ELLs is EverQuest's use of audio. The initial release of the game had 130 hours (70,000 lines) of spoken dialogue provided by 1,700 voice actors. Such an audio-rich environment makes for a more immersive experience, Gooch says.
This rich audio component had a beneficial effect on pronunciation in the Northwestern study. Rankin is also convinced that it was responsible for accelerating improvements in comprehension and vocabulary acquisition as the players moved through the game. As they advanced to level 10 and higher, their vocabulary test scores improved significantly. "At that level, just about every avatar you meet has audio associated with the text," she says. "When you're a newbie, only a few key avatars have speech associated with their text. The students told us in the post-interview that hearing the words spoken was enormously helpful."
Role-playing games, however, do appear to have their shortcomings. As good as EverQuest II may be at helping players to build vocabulary, it proved much less effective at conveying the grammatical aspects of language. "It just seems to get lost," says Rankin. "They're understanding meaning, but they're not worried about subject-verb agreement."
And MMORPGs are not best suited for absolute beginners. The researchers concluded in their report on the study: "We realize that if the ESL student is to benefit from the immersive environment represented in role-playing games, the participant should possess a minimum of intermediate-level knowledge of the English language."
Rankin plans on continuing her exploration of the potential of role-playing games in language acquisition in a follow-up study at the University of Mississippi. This time around, she intends to increase the subject pool, prohibit paired play (most of the players in the first study played in twos), and provide a support "scaffolding" that includes a digital dictionary.
"We observed that the students were looking up a lot of phrases in books they brought or translation computers," Gooch explains. "They spent a lot of time asking each other and the tutor what somebody meant: 'I know what this word means, and I know what that word means; what do they mean in this phrase?' Ideally, we'd like to make everything clickable. You say something to me that I don't understand, and I should be able to click on the text on the screen to get definitions of the words or explanations of the phrase—kind of an instant translation."
Meanwhile, Gooch says he is set to start a new a project to investigate the potential of MMORPGs as environments for teaching algebra and geometry. He's also in the midst of testing out role-playing games on English language learners at the high school level. He fully expects that the results from the middle school studies will carry over. "It was a longer process to get permission to work with a high school, or we would have started there with our pilot study," he says. "We have since obtained permission from two high schools, and we now have studies ongoing there." Gooch says preliminary results from these studies are similar to the outcomes obtained in the first study.
