Vance Stevens on Language Learning in Minecraft at the 2021 JALTCALL SIG Forum on Games and Play
Channel: Vance Stevens
Date: 17/11/2021

Leveraging language learning through the participatory culture surrounding Minecraft 

My focus here is on Minecraft and helping teachers to understand the participatory culture surrounding such games and how they can use this to leverage their students' learning of the target language. Over the years the EVO Minecraft MOOC community has accumulated considerable anecdotal and some quantitative data regarding their students’ acquisition of target language occurring both in and around this challenging and enjoyable game. However, to be effective in a student-teacher dynamic, teachers have to experience for themselves the many nuances of the game as they strive to communicate to others their discoveries, as students tend to do during and after game play through a target language which, in many cross-cultural contexts, tends to be English. EVO Minecraft MOOC was conceived as an environment to foster discovery learning among teachers learning the game, and by extrapolation with their students, via critical thinking, and problem solving through meaningful play.

Minecraft tends to be highly gamified (in the sense that certain aspects are designed to hold people in the game and allow them to gain increasing powers as they master lower level accomplishments), but it also has great potential as a game-based platform for teaching and modeling content concepts in numerous disciplines, and I would want to elaborate on this a bit.

I have a number of presentations and publications on this topic, all available online, which I have created over the past 7 years of EVO Minecraft MOOC, mostly listed at https://vancestevens.com/papers/ and http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/.