Analog Game Plan
By: Thaddeus Mccleary
Tags: Education

Teaching in China via Kansas

I am an instructor in the English Department at Fort Hays State University. Our department offers a degree specifically for students in our cross-border partnerships in China that focuses more on developing English language skills for professional contexts than creative writing or literature. I teach face-to-face courses for this degree program at one of our satellite campuses in China.

This semester my courses focus on listening and speaking skill development. Learning units are organized around different modes of communication in professional settings such as interviews, presentations, and debates (beyond conversation and project collaboration). Content used in the course is relatively superficial and is not included as a major component of any assessment. Instead, the focus is on providing a variety of communicative tasks in class that help students prepare for formal demonstrations.

Conversation games are a good fit for a regular class period as they provide a format for communication (game mechanics) and a topic within a low-stress activity. Simply holding a deck of cards is more likely to remind students of a game than a learning exercise. This is useful as it lowers language learners’ affective filters, making them more relaxed and open to communication.

This particular game idea would help students prepare for an upcoming “peer interview” task, where pairs of students will discuss their personal and professional goals.

Improvements

Having considered feedback, I am planning to make two major improvements to the game:

Individual Goals

Previously, I planned to have players contribute event cards toward a single goal. For example, at the beginning of the game the group might turn over a goal card that says, “Retire at age 50.” Then, on each turn players would look through their cards (as well as the cards other players have contributed toward the goal) to try to find an event that might relate to that goal.

The problem with this idea is that it incentivizes a type of cutthroat competition that might actually lead students to exclude their opponents’ cards without a valid reason. The communicative goal is to be able to understand the goal and explain how your choice might contribute. The idea here is creativity and clarity in communication.

Therefore, it might be better to have students draw individual goal cards (similar to the gameplay of the board game Ticket to Ride). At the beginning of the game, players choose a goal card to pursue and then place it in front of them (face up, so that everyone can see each other’s goals) and then place the event cards they play on each hand underneath the goal. After explaining their choice, other players vote to determine simply whether the explanation is valid before moving on.

This change would also offer a greater variety of goals, which in linguistic terms increases the amount of (hopefully comprehensible) linguistic input. This additional reading and listening will contribute more to language acquisition than the first iteration of this game idea provided.

Student Contributions

The second change makes the game a much more complete learning experience. Instead of having an instructor provide all of the cards (goals and events), a classmate suggested allowing students to contribute their own cards. I think this is a great improvement for two main reasons.

First, it facilitates greater buy-in. Students will be more invested in the gameplay if they feel they have played a meaningful role in designing or developing it. This is particularly important with adult learners in a university context, where some students may push back against the idea of “playing a game” in class. We are already dealing with difficulties differentiating our classes, which are geared toward language proficiency, from traditional language classes, which place more emphasis on conscious learning and rote-memorization of grammar rules and vocabulary.

Second, it adds an additional language production component. Even though the class does not focus on writing, this creative task is likely to generate conversations between students as they brainstorm ideas. Of course, I will show them examples first and give them suggestions as to how they might improve upon the provided decks. They might need to ask me for clarification or negotiate about the language of their cards, which is another practical skill they are developing. We should negotiate meaning, not attempt to use “perfect English”.

Next Steps

Next week I will be developing a prototype of the game to try in my classes. With these changes in place, I feel much more confident about my lesson preparation and game development tasks.