Abstract
Video games that require players to utilize a target or second language to complete tasks have emerged as alternative pedagogical tools for Second Language Acquisition (SLA). With the exception of vocabulary acquisition, much of the prior research in game-based SLA fails to gauge students' literacy skills, specifically their morphological awareness or understanding of the smallest meaningful linguistic units (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, and roots). Given this shortcoming, we utilize a two-player online game to facilitate social interactions between Native English Speakers (NES) and English as a Second Language (ESL) students as a mechanism to generate ESL students' written output in the targeted language and draw attention to their morphological awareness. Analysis of chat logs demonstrates the game's potential to enhance ESL students' morphological awareness and other important L2 literacy skills such as word reading accuracy. Both NES and ESL students' reflections of their gameplay experiences suggest game design modifications that promote ESL students' willingness to communicate with NES while developing their morphological awareness and practicing their L2 communication and literacy skills.
Highlights
One of the challenges of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is providing ample opportunities for non-native speakers to practice their communication skills in the target or second language (L2) as a means for developing communicative competence — knowing what to say, when to say it and how to say it [4, 5, 38]
Though only a few errors were found in the four-week language sample, these results suggest that ESL1 and ESL2 would benefit from explicit morphological instruction [45] that emphasizes grammatical suffixes and prefixes to enhance their literacy skills, including spelling, vocabulary acquisition, and reading comprehension
We developed a prototype of a socially interactive game that provided an opportunity for four English as a Second Language (ESL) students to interact with four Native English Speakers (NES) and reflect on their morphological awareness as part of the gameplay experience
Summary
One of the challenges of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is providing ample opportunities for non-native speakers to practice their communication skills in the target or second language (L2) as a means for developing communicative competence — knowing what to say, when to say it and how to say it [4, 5, 38]. Video games that require players to use the L2 to complete game tasks have emerged as alternative pedagogical tools for language learning, creating the genre of game-based SLA [29, 35, 74, 76, 77]. Recreational games such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (e.g., World of Warcraft), not intentionally designed to promote SLA, feature an immersive.
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