Learn English or die: The effects of digital games on interaction and willingness to communicate in a foreign language

In recent years there has been a lot of interest in the potential role of digital games in language education. Playing digital games is said to be motivating to students and to benefit the development of social skills, such as collaboration, and metacognitive skills such as planning and organisation. An important potential benefit is also that digital games encourage the use of the target language in a non-threatening environment. Willingness to communicate has been shown to affect second language acquisition in a number of ways and it is therefore important to investigate if there is a connection between playing games and learners’ interaction in the target language. In this article we report on the results of a pilot study that investigated the effects of playing an online multiplayer game on the quantity and quality of second language interaction in the game and on participants’ willingness to communicate in the target language. We will show that digital games can indeed affect second language interaction patterns and contribute to second language acquisition, but that this depends, like in all other teaching and learning environments, on careful pedagogic planning of the activity. Keywords: dig i ta l games , interac t ion, language t eaching se cond language acquis i t ion, wi l l ingness to communicate . Recent years have seen a growing interest in the pedagogical benefits of digital games for language learning. Gee (2003), for example, identified 36 learning principles that he found to be present in many of the games he investigated. An example of these is the ‘Active, Critical Learning Principle’. This stipulates that “All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning. ” In other words, computer games engage learners and involve in the tasks at hand. A second principle is the ‘Regime of Competence Principle’ where “the learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not ‘undoable. ’” (Gee, 2003, p. 36). Most games adapt to the player’s level until they succeed, at which point new challenges appear. These principles are intuitively appealing and grounded in educational research, but it is not clear how and to what extent they are related to second language acquisition. There is not much research on the effects of game play on learning a second language and the purpose of this article is to review this small body of research before describing the results of a study investigating the relationship between participation in an online multiplayer gaming environment and second language interaction patters and participants’ attitudes towards interacting in the target language (English). We limit ourselves in this study to an investigation of the acquisition of aspects of the target language. We acknowledge the importance of sociocultural and ecological views of language acquisition (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008; Van Lier 2004) but these were not the focus of this study. For a “cognitive ethnography” of gaming and its effect on literacy practices, we refer the reader to Steinkuehler (2006; 2008). Learn English or die 5 The effects of game play on second language acquisition Many claims are made for the benefits of games on affective factors such as anxiety and motivation, but few studies have directly investigated the effects of digital games on second language acquisition. An example of such a study was conducted by deHaan, Reed and Kuwada (2010), who investigated the effects of playing a digital game versus watching it on immediate and delayed recall of vocabulary by Japanese learners. Participants in the study were given a music game in which the players had to complete parts of a song by pressing controller buttons at the correct time. Participants in this study did not collaborate but were interacting only with the computer (Chapelle’s human-computer interaction; 2001). An important feature of the study, and perhaps a major limitation, is that participants did not have to understand the English in order to play the game. The authors found that playing the game resulted in less vocabulary acquisition than watching it (although both resulted in learning gains), probably as a result of the greater cognitive load of having to interact with the game. A postexperimental questionnaire revealed that there was no difference between players and watchers in terms of their mental effort, so the effects were due only to their interaction with the game. The authors argue that playing digital games and interactivity are therefore not necessarily conducive to language acquisition. However, it is of course important to understand these findings in light of the fact that the language was not a focal part of participants’ experience and that they could complete the tasks without attention to the vocabulary. It is therefore important that future studies investigate gaming environments that do involve meaningful language use. Another limitation of this study was the nature of the game that was chosen. This genre of game lacks a detailed narrative component that requires comprehension in order to respond appropriately, which is common in many adventure games, for example. That noticing linguistic elements in an environment where the primary focus is not on language is possible in a gaming environment was shown by Piirainen-Marsh and Tainio (2009), who used Conversation Analysis to examine how two teenage boys repeated language elements in the game to show their involvement and to make sense of the game. Video recordings of their game interactions showed frequent repetitions both in the form of immediate imitation but also for anticipatory use and to recontextualise previously heard utterances, or to expand on them. The authors conclude: ‘On the whole, repetition offers a flexible resource through which the participants display continued attention to relevant features of the game and co-construct the collaborative play activity’ (p. 166). This study did not investigate the effects of this repetition on linguistic acquisition, however. Similarly, Zheng, Young, Wagner and Brewer (2009) focused on the effects of game play on the interaction and collaborative construction of cultural and discourse practices between native and non-native speakers in the educational game Quest Atlantis. The collaborative nature of the game required a deep exchange between the two dyads of players and encouraged the development of not only semantic and syntactic, but also pragmatic knowledge, and both from native to non-native speaker and vice versa. The authors refer to this type of interaction as negotiation for action. Chen and Johnson (2004) “modded” a commercial role playing game called Neverwinter Nights (Bioware, 2002) to investigate whether a digital game simulating a foreign language learning context could promote a state of ‘flow’ and motivate students to practise language skills (Spanish in the case of this study) outside of the classroom. The authors used questionnaires, video transcripts, field notes, and a post-game interview to investigate this but realised that there were significant differences in the