Games: They're not just for fun anymore. Incorporating 'serious' games in a second/foreign language context provides targeted practice in additional genres, lowers speaking anxiety, and improves attitudes towards oneself and the language.
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.
Native Teaching Aids (NTA), a game production company in Montana, offered me an internship in 2022. I observed the process of creating games from A-Z.
During my internship, I created the game Séwiš! at the request of a Séliš-Ql̓ispé teacher. The game design is ready, and waiting on NTA for graphics and printing.
After writing up my observations, methods, and recommendations, I gave a talk at LSA 2023 and presented a poster at AAAL 2023.
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.
Lesson plans incorporating tabletop games to practice persuasiveness when speaking
We presented our work at TESOL International and Kent State University's research forum
We wrote a chapter on how to use the game "Snake Oil" in an ESL class for Nurmukhamedov & Sadler's (2020) book.
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.
We included types of English vs. Chinese pronouns with syntactic examples, and games & activities for practicing English anaphora.
Clara & I presented our work at Ohio TESOL, TESOL International, and Kent State University's research forum.
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.
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.