Documentary and descriptive linguists can support Indigenous language revitalization by collaborating with language instructors and cultural practitioners to create pedagogical materials for specific language acquisition. Material design informed by the frameworks of task-based language teaching (TBLT), the ethnography of communication, and gamification of language learning can structure creation of culturally appropriate content that reduces learner anxiety and supports fluency. This project offers a case study in how to design a tabletop game customized for communication in a specific Indigenous language with input from language teachers & language documentation records. 

I had the privilege of working with Ms. Melanie Sandoval, a Séliš-Ql̓ispé (Bitterroot Salish) teacher, to create the game Séwiš (Ask It) that provides practice with pronouns, transitivity, aspect, and affixes in questions, affirmative and negative answers. Vocabulary and syntactic information about this polysynthetic language came from old language documentation records, a dictionary, and classroom workbooks. I've also provided suggestions for philosophical underpinnings, researcher-practitioner partnership, resource locations, design methodology, reflection on the person and the process, and encouragement toward replication in other communities. 

Matt Wong (my colleague and game-playing friend) and I developed this project over 2017-2019 about incorporating gameplay into a teaching unit on persuasive rhetoric in the listening/speaking classroom. The target audience are advanced-intermediate to high EFL/ESL learners, but can be modified for other languages or proficiency levels. We found that playing "Snake Oil" and other tabletop games lessened anxiety, improved speaking fluency and rhetorical impact.

Colleague Clara Fodera and I developed this project during 2017-2018 about incorporating gameplay into a unit on teaching English pronouns and anaphora to Chinese speakers. We developed lesson plans for beginner, intermediate, and advanced English language learners struggling with discourse functions, gender errors, mismatch effects, noun phrases, pronouns, referent tracking, and referring expressions.

A glimpse into the polyglot's lexicon: Slips of the tongue made by multilingual speakers  

Josiah Murphy, Cody Cox, Jose Ignacio Basabe Ramos, & Courtney Wilson (2016) Kent State University

We conducted experiments on polyglots playing a word game in order to measure error patterns such as slips of the tongue (SOT) and tip of the tongue (TOT) states. Initial analysis considered cross-linguistic influence (CLI), interlingual word association, and lexical retrieval difficulty as well. Participants code-switched or translanguaged when aware that the other player was also multilingual, despite this increasing the likelihood of errors. 

Polynesian Voyages: A tabletop game about crossing the Pacific  

I am developing a new boardgame in which players travel around the Pacific Ocean, following the Polynesian voyagers and learning about cultures & languages in order to arrive at their destination.