Gaming Literacy and Its Pedagogical Implications

Abstract

Traditionally, there is a dichotomy of spoken and written language facility, but a new kind of ‘biliteracy’ seems to have emerged, whereby there is now one way to write a language in the online medium and another to write it offline. Be that as it may, online literacy could also be a source of influence on the offline literacy, just as speech has affected written literacy. For instance, contraction is now found in the latter. One big area of online literacy is gaming literacy, which is the focus of this paper. The impact of gaming literacy and justification for this study can be indirectly seen in the revenue statistics of online gaming. While parents of some youngsters often complain that online games ‘fracture’ their children’s language, this paper seeks to argue that gaming literacy not only is a creative development of language but also has its pedagogical potential for even aiding the acquisition of a second language (L2). This chapter begins with some brief discussion of gamer talk characteristics, followed by an explicit focus on gamer slang (“ludolects”), and then, with the aid of questionnaire findings and some literature reviews, goes on to explore the bigger picture: gaming literacy’s pedagogical implications in terms of “paratextuality”, social identity and learner autonomy.