Innovations in my future teaching

The new technology has changed the way people live and with increasing frequency changed the way our young generations are learning. Before taking this unit, as an EFL teacher in China, I tried to incorporate new media like English movies into my language class, which can increase exposure to target language and its different culture background for my EFL students. However, I didn’t realize video games might be used into our daily class, actually as a powerful teaching tool. Because in China, videogames are still considered as “electronic heroin”, which teenagers could easily get addicted to and leads to heath issues and disengagement with school. I felt shocked to read in the report by Ben Williamson (2009) that in UK quite a number of teachers have already used computer games in their teaching. Through reading blogs and wacthing YouTube, I also found that game-based learning is very common in some teaching contexts and its amazing potential has been gradually explored. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to be taken into this new practical area and have learned so much useful information, which is helpful for my future teaching. Here are some of new methods with the videogames as a teaching tool I will use in my English class.

Use video games for implicit grammar teaching.

In language class, the biggest challenge for teachers is how to make grammar teaching attractive to students and easy to remember. Students always feel confused and bored with the abstract rules in grammar class, even though I have tried to make the rules explicit and succinct. Students learned and forgot. Here are some little video games that may help me solve the problem. I found them on this website: www.learnenglish.org.uk. There are lots of interesting games for teachers to choose from for different teaching purpose. These games are not too complex and don’t take much time of class.

For example, when I want to teach students about adjective order, I will use the matching game. Before letting students play the game, I will make a brief introduction about what to do in this game. Then students can follow the instructions to put different adjectives in their right places. If they meet new words, they can click Cambridge Online Dictionary for help whenever they need help. After the game playing, students and teacher can conclude the rule together. The new method is intended to make students figure out grammatical rules by themselves through game playing, which is interesting to students and helpful for their memorization. It can leaven the lump of monotonous grammar teaching and promote the effectiveness of teaching.

Video games for immersive learning

Just like movies function in the language teaching, video games can not only provide students with a language environment but in an interactive way. Nearly all the video games can achieve the purpose, especially commercial games. However, given the negative impact I mentioned in my last blog entry about the journal article by Aguilera and Mendiz (2003), I would be careful with the choice of games beyond edutainment software. ‘Prime suspects’ would be one game I recommend my students to play. It provides an immersive Single-Player Gameplay. Every Player is a detective chasing a jewel thief. Enough clues are needed to analyze the suspects’ locations during the crime and confirm suspects innocent. During the limited time, players are given a number of names of items and they need to find these items in some particular settings. During this game, players can learn a lot of vocabulary items such as office supplies, kitchen appliances and even icecream flavors, which are frequently seen and used in the daily life but rarely mentioned in the textbooks. Students can learn many polysemous words with images visually presented in front of them. For example, they can know the word ‘spade’ both as a garden tool and a figure on the card. They can learn words violin and cello with different images in their mind. Diverse mission objectives and events on more than 15 maps combined with beautiful pictures and music attract students’ attention. The well-hidden items add to the difficulty, which challenges students and make them more engaged. It can be an excellent way to increase students’ vocabulary.

Taking cue from students’ passion for video games

If there is one thing that young English learners and ESL classes have in common around the world, it's their passion for playing video games. They love to play and also love to talk about video games. Besides using video games, I will also take cue form students’ enthusiasm and use it in my oral English class. To those students unwilling to speak in English, an interesting topic would be a trigger. I will design some lessons devoted to getting students to talk about video games - but in English! For example, I will bring some video game advertisements into class and let them read and have a discussion about these games. And many relevant topics such as my favorite video game and what do I think about video games can also be used in the oral class. Fluency of their speech and accuracy of word choice can be developed through the practice. (posted by Ronda)

References

Williamson, B. (2009 ). Computer games, schools, and young people: A report for educators on using games for learning. from http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/project_reports/becta/Games_and_Learning_educators_report.pdf

Aguilera, M. D. & Mendiz, A. (2003). Video Games and Education. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 1, 1, 1-14