Acquisition of Japanese as a Foreign Language Through a Baseball Video Game

Abstract: Video games have become increasingly more popular and more technologically advanced. This one-month study used interview, observation, self-report, and reading and listening test data to demonstrate and investigate how one intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) student improved his listening comprehension and kanji character recognition by playing a Japanese baseball video game. It is suggested that language acquisition was facilitated by the subject's ability to control the video game's repetitive, highly contextualized, and simultaneously presented aural and textual language. Limitations of the study and implications for the foreign language teacher are briefly discussed. Key words: case study, JFL (Japanese-as-a-foreign-language), listening, reading, video game Language: Japanese Background Video games have grown increasingly more popular; hundreds of millions of video games are sold each year, and Phillips, Rolls, Rouse, and Griffiths (1995) studied 816 11- to 16-year olds and found that over 75% of them played video games, with many playing 30 minutes to an hour every day. Video games have also advanced technologically; modern sports games feature trueto-life graphics and celebrity play-by-play announcers that make them almost indistinguishable from the real games on Saturday afternoon television. Is it possible that video games may not only entertain, but also serve in the process of language acquisition? Although material authenticity has been found to be beneficial (Peacock, 1997; Thanajaro, 2000), and instrumental motivation can play a large role in language learning (Van Aacken, 1999), the fact that nearly all commercial video games are designed for native speakers (Japanese and American games are often translated for distribution in other countries) and are highly motivating does not mean that games will guarantee the acquisition of language. Additional support is needed before video games are used to enhance certain areas of formal language education for motivated individuals. l First, because video games are quite repetitious (batting in a baseball game or navigating menus in a simulation game may be the game's most integral and enjoyable aspect), they may prolong time on task and allow for increased familiarity of unknown language in video games. Gass and Selinker (2001) advanced the idea that language learners are able to unravel new language based on its context, and because a video game player already understands the setting of repetitive language used in a game, he/she may be able to decode first semantic and then lexical and/or syntactic items ("bootstrap"), or vice versa, thereby building receptive comprehension skills that may later be transferred to more productive usage. Second, although the question of control is complex and largely unexplored (see Skehan, 1989, for a discussion of locus of control and its effects on individual motivation), a player's control of a video game's language may facilitate acquisition. A player can affect the audio commentary and textual dialogues of a video game much more than they can influence a conversation, radio broadcast, television show, or movie. While each of the latter mediums can be recorded and examined more closely, this procedure may be much more arduous than playing a video game that might naturally facilitate exposure to or acquisition of lexicon and phonology naturally interwoven with game play. Indeed, a language learner curious about a particular string of language may choose to either repeat an action in a video game and listen more attentively to particular lexical or syntactic items, or pause the game to consider what he/she has been exposed to. Many video games even allow the player to decide when events or conversations take place, thereby giving a language learner even more control over the game's language. Being in control may increase a language learner's level of involvement, a factor that Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) emphasized as being important in language acquisition. …