Second Language Acquisition with Games

[Trilderberg]

I teach English as a foreign language in Eastern Europe, and I've noticed a type among my students in their teens. Two things distinguish them. First, they are very proficient in English, beyond any level that I would expect from EFL classes alone; Second they all participate in a gaming subculture online.

I have plenty of proficient students that aren't at all interested in games, but I don't think I've met any that are as capable as these kids. In addition to using pervasive internet lingo, they readily, and correctly use colloquial constructions that no EFL teacher would ever bother teaching. This distinguishes their English from other learners that are simply excellent EFL students, making them seem nativelike in conversation. It's fairly normal in this country for parents to have their kids privately tutored in English, and while this can also distinguish a student, the gamer kids with and without tutors are often comparable to the non-gamer kids that get tutored. I'm not a private tutor, my classes are mostly extracurricular, and often relatively large.

Most, but not all of these kids are male, and younger teens. Some are clearly well off, but others seem not to be (although all of their parents can afford to put them in a class with me).

 

Does anyone else have any insight into this?

Have you encountered any research about language acquisition and video games, specifically games not designed to be educational?

[Dosed]

I'm an EFL teacher currently teaching in Vietnam, with 3 years of experience in Madrid, and I've noticed the same thing. It tends to be the teenage boys who pick up those kinds of things I guess due to the stereotypical idea of teenage boys spending far too much online. However, depending on the age  I think it's common for boys to be the brasher, louder ones even when the girls are often capable of producing really good language too. They often say super specific things to games such as "get wrecked" or "pentakill" in often kind of ridiculous situations, which I think is really funny, but probably not all that useful for them in general. 

 

When you say proficient do you mean in the sense of the CEFR like completely fluent C2 level or just much better than their classmates and more competent? Coz I'm not sure about Poland but the level of English in Spain (don't know much about Vietnam just yet), particularly in terms of speaking, for younger people isn't crazy good yet. But I do think it helps them. It certainly exposes them more to the spoken language and it's even better since it's something they're clearly interested in. 

 

When I was learning Spanish I found video games to be pretty useful in terms of listening to the language, but my level of Spanish at the time was good enough that anything I was learning was a bonus rather than it being confusing. I learned a lot of random stuff  that way. I also almost exclusively played games I'd already played before in English so that definitely helped. I actually found watching kids TV shows way more useful in terms of exposure. I think a lot of the kids pick stuff up from streamers too who tend to use English memes or expressions anyway. 

 

How is teaching in Poland? Do you teach adults too? I was actually planning on moving to Poland for my first teaching job, but it never worked out. Have you tried any games to help you learn Polish? I've heard it's not the easiest language to learn... 

 

[Henke]

Just personally speaking (and I'm sure plenty of other non-native-English speakers on this forum will say the same thing) I learned most of my English from games and other media. By the time we started learning English in grade 3 or 4, Inspector Gadget and Transformers had already set me up with a pretty good foundation.

[Jutranjo]

I'm not a native English speaker but I learned a lot of English and German growing up from TV and games. I had 12 years of English and 4 of German classes in school as well as an extra curricular course in English.

All those classes always felt very easy, knowing by ear things like the gender of words in German or the nonsense adjective order "rule" in English helped a lot. Learning what exactly different tenses were called and how to sort different sentences into them was much harder in comparison.

 

It's much easier to immerse yourself in an English environment if you're playing an all English game with no subtitles in your native language, or if you're playing it online and the expected language is English.

 

There's also two other things, even when I'm talking about a game with other Slovenes or playing MTG we'll all use in-game terms instead of Slovene words, it'll be invisible not neviden. The other is that younger people will very often just throw in English phrases in every day conversations. Do you sometimes hear your students throwing in some English phrases when they're talking to each other?

[Trilderberg]

1 hour ago, Dosed said:

I'm an EFL teacher currently teaching in Vietnam, with 3 years of experience in Madrid, and I've noticed the same thing. It tends to be the teenage boys who pick up those kinds of things I guess due to the stereotypical idea of teenage boys spending far too much online. However, depending on the age  I think it's common for boys to be the brasher, louder ones even when the girls are often capable of producing really good language too. They often say super specific things to games such as "get wrecked" or "pentakill" in often kind of ridiculous situations, which I think is really funny, but probably not all that useful for them in general. 

 

When you say proficient do you mean in the sense of the CEFR like completely fluent C2 level or just much better than their classmates and more competent? Coz I'm not sure about Poland but the level of English in Spain (don't know much about Vietnam just yet), particularly in terms of speaking, for younger people isn't crazy good yet. But I do think it helps them. It certainly exposes them more to the spoken language and it's even better since it's something they're clearly interested in. 

 

When I was learning Spanish I found video games to be pretty useful in terms of listening to the language, but my level of Spanish at the time was good enough that anything I was learning was a bonus rather than it being confusing. I learned a lot of random stuff  that way. I also almost exclusively played games I'd already played before in English so that definitely helped. I actually found watching kids TV shows way more useful in terms of exposure. I think a lot of the kids pick stuff up from streamers too who tend to use English memes or expressions anyway. 

 

 

I only have a passing familiarity with the CEFR, so I can't say much about how these kids would stack up. The thing that sets them apart most clearly is their conversational ability.  In this sense, they're far above the intended level of the class, or the aggregate level of a similarly aged class with no gamers in it. In addition to using gaming slang, and sort of preteen internet words like 'cringe,' they use a lot of informal constructions that I assume they've heard, and are now emulating. The other day, one of these students told me that a situation "would be pretty rough." for more than one reason, that's something that an EFL teacher wouldn't teach a kid to say.

Another thing that's interesting is that they're generally playing online multiplayer games, which are less immersive, but obviously offer more opportunities for social interaction. I think it's popular to play up the viability of learning through immersion, for example learning the word for an object by needing to interact with it, as would happen in an adventure game. But in an Overwatch match, the language is more natural, and maybe more available, but also significantly less immersive, or contextualized in the game world. Tactics-oriented language might also be more repetitive.

I should also say that of about ten of the kids I've met this year that fit this profile, two are girls. So boyishness doesn't seem to explain it to me, although these two are less bombastic than their male counterparts in class.

 

Also, I've unfortunately never been to Poland. I'm in Russia. Spanish feels about twice as intuitive as Russian to my feeble western mind. Russian is dope, but it's loco. I'm not sure how Polish works, but it could be similar.

  

[Dosed]

Oh I have no idea why I assumed Poland from your first post. Sorry! Yeah, I've had very similar situations in my classes. I had a 7 year old kid say "Oh my goodness!" as an exclamation. I never even say "oh my gosh" around the kids so you can definitely see he picks up stuff from videos/movies etc. And he's one of the brighter students in the class so it's obvious he's spending a lot of time with English outside of the class.

 

Anecdotally I've heard some of the most fluent people, who literally sound like natives unless you know otherwise, say they picked up English from Cartoon Network, South Park, the internet etc. It makes me kind of jealous that a lot of the media needs to be accessed through English coz while I am taking Vietnamese lessons my desire to learn it is lower than any other language I've studied, and I don't feel the need other than not to feel like a complete moron here.  

4 hours ago, Jutranjo said:

The other is that younger people will very often just throw in English phrases in every day conversations. Do you sometimes hear your students throwing in some English phrases when they're talking to each other?

I used to play Overwatch with a Spanish speaker and while they say things like "Tracer está super tocada" meaning "Tracer is super low on health", which doesn't translate literally and that's obviously Spanish gaming speak, they also blend English into stuff too. Like for example they say "Mainear" which is from English "to main" a character, as in play them as your main character, but just adding the "-ear" ending to a verb to make it sound Spanish. However, English words pop up in Spanish all the time, and often in ways that make no sense to English speakers.

 

Also, They say things like "está super heavy" meaning "it's super heavy", as in any difficult or uncomfortable situation, but native speakers wouldn't use heavy like that unless something was very depressing. My favourite is "puenting" which means "bridging" literally, but they use it to mean bungee jumping because if you add "-ing" to anything it sounds English. I can't speak to other languages, but the Vietnamese kids/young adults often say common things like "oh my god" during Vietnamese conversations. 

 

How does English get into Slovenian conversations? 

[Saltimbanco]

I'd say I can speak English. For reference, the last time I had to take the TOEFL test I scored 112 or 115 out of 120. I never had any formal English education, I learned everything I know from video games, maybe a little bit from movies and TV. Sure, I had classes in school, but those basically taught me the verb "To Be" repeatedly, every single year, for 10 years or so. I remember one occasion in 8th grade when the teacher asked if we knew a certain, very simple thing, and no one else in the class knew. He was horrified that the previous teachers never covered that, and that he'd have to retrace old lessons. I thought to myself "The teachers were fine, it's just that no one here paid attention, they all did the bare minimum to pass, then forgot what little they learned". So I can say confidently that no mandatory class I ever attended had any impact on my knowledge of the English language.

 

I think it's a matter of instant gratification. Taking classes and learning a second language can often be enriching, and pay off in the future. Learning what the hell this item you just picked up does, pays off right now. It doesn't feel like studying, it's a challenge like any other in the game. With each thing learned you're adding tools to your repertoire with which you can tackle future challenges. It has a high barrier of entry, to be sure. It's like a cumulative distribution, there's a lot to learn in the beginning, but then it plateaus and you only run into words you don't know every once in a while. If you can get past that initial daunting period where you don't know anything, then it gets really easy. Half the time you won't even need a dictionary and you'll pick up what is being said through context alone. However, in this generations, and the tail-end of the last one, subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese, and even voice acting at times have become far more common. I can't if kids now would feel the same impetus to learn English that I did, or if they do, whether it would take the same form for them that it did for me.

 

I think the game that I can best exemplify my journey with is Chrono Cross. I was around 10 years old when I first played it. It blew me away. JRPGs had never caught my eye prior to this, just lots of text I couldn't understand and unimpressive gameplay from my outside perspective. In this sense, the graphics were really what attracted me to it. It looked amazing. But there's a bit more to it. The game starts In Medias Res, as an excuse to let you sample some late-game spells and abilities, which, for the time, were a blast to behold. Then you get to your objective and there's a weird cutscene, all you see is flashes, and I was like "What?! What was that?! Is he holding a bloody knife?! Did the main character stab the other party member?! I thought they were friends! Oh, and now the main character just wakes up in his bed and I don't find out what happens next?!". That little bit of visual storytelling blew my mind, it's what got me hooked on it. Of course, I still didn't understand anything, but I replayed that intro a thousand times trying to get it. I'd play other games, but I would always go back to Chrono Cross after 6 months or so to try and make more progress in it. Eventually, I was able to find the other party NPCs and get the quest leaving the starting town. Sometime later I was actually able to complete that quest and get the scales I needed. Then the game threw me for another loop, sending the main character to a parallel dimension where he had died ten years earlier and no one recognizes him. That's another thing that blew my mind. Got stuck again after that. Around 4 or 5 years after the first time I played it, after a much longer break since my previous attempt, I thought "Know what? I bet I can go all the way now", and I did. It was after this that I felt like I could officially say I could speak English.

[Jutranjo]

4 minutes ago, Dosed said:

How does English get into Slovenian conversations? 

 

Do you mean in what context or how this state of things came about?

[Trilderberg]

2 hours ago, Saltimbanco said:

I think it's a matter of instant gratification. Taking classes and learning a second language can often be enriching, and pay off in the future. Learning what the hell this item you just picked up does, pays off right now. It doesn't feel like studying, it's a challenge like any other in the game. With each thing learned you're adding tools to your repertoire with which you can tackle future challenges. It has a high barrier of entry, to be sure. It's like a cumulative distribution, there's a lot to learn in the beginning, but then it plateaus and you only run into words you don't know every once in a while. If you can get past that initial daunting period where you don't know anything, then it gets really easy. Half the time you won't even need a dictionary and you'll pick up what is being said through context alone. However, in this generations, and the tail-end of the last one, subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese, and even voice acting at times have become far more common. I can't if kids now would feel the same impetus to learn English that I did, or if they do, whether it would take the same form for them that it did for me.

 

 

I think that's true. Games are not only designed to be immersive, they're also designed to be addictive, which is more than I can say about my Russian textbook.

 

I'm curious what games you played, other than Chrono Cross. Did you play a lot of JRPGs? Games from that era were obviously less reliant on audio dialogue, so the learning experience would be more reading oriented, which could be better practice depending on the type of game.

 

How do you think your pronunciation is?

[sucks2Bme]

hello! I also teach english but in central europe. Most of my students though are older (univ. and up) and my classes nowadays are mostly conversational either as a perk for employees or for students to maintain their English. I have had a few classes though with late teens and some of them were avid Video game players. 

 

Myself learned a lot of english from playing video games as a child, mostly vocabulary through context (some of which was wrong and I had to lookup the actual definitions of the words much later) by playing old infocom games - the text ones with the parser. My dad is American though so I had a foundation for the language and in sweden most things were not dubbed so access to english was pretty easy. Here in czech where i live and teach now, most things are subtitled but my girlfriend is basically fluent in english and she learned it mostly from watching the simpsons as a child, which i think she pirated or somehow got "illegally" since it wasn't dubbed. 

 

I do still have one student who used to play a lot of games growing up and we have talked about how it helped him learn english.   

 

The gamification of language learning is probably best realized at the moment by Duolingo and similar apps and isnt necessarily new, a friend of mine successfully uses RPG elements in her classroom and students get to "level" up and specialize in their "class" of choice (i use quotes because i do not remember exactly what that means in this context!)  Using games for education as they are though does have some pitfalls. My aforementioned student has no problem explaining the newest Hearthstone expansion to me but when it comes to explaining details of his job, which requires a completely different vocabulary, sometimes it gets difficult. 

 

I also found some relevant links on this topics , but I haven't explored them really so i can't comment on the content but they might be itneresting:

 

https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2421&context=oa_dissertations  (Using Video Games To Increase Motivation Of Saudi Students Learning English)

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/video-game-literacy/ (HOW video gameS LIKE MINECRAFT ACTUALLY HELP KIDS LEARN TO READ)

https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/38299/URN%3ANBN%3Afi%3Ajyu-201208182168.pdf  (APPLYING VIDEO GAMES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING)

 

as far as using english phrases in sentences, it doesnt really happen here that i have noticed, partly due to there being a huge variety in english language level even at the younger age bracket. However, most multi-national companies which have a presence here use english as their official office language so sometimes words like "meeting room" will be used. There is a lot of internet slang/words that originate from english and its usually easier to incorporate the english words somehow than to invent new ones, like tvitovat - to tweet, or download and upload although those also have czech equivalents

 

 

 

[Saltimbanco]

58 minutes ago, Dandan Mian said:

 

I think that's true. Games are not only designed to be immersive, they're also designed to be addictive, which is more than I can say about my Russian textbook.

 

I'm curious what games you played, other than Chrono Cross. Did you play a lot of JRPGs? Games from that era were obviously less reliant on audio dialogue, so the learning experience would be more reading oriented, which could be better practice depending on the type of game.

 

How do you think your pronunciation is?

 

I didn't play JRPGs back then. I might have actually played FFVII before Chrono Cross, but the gameplay was less flashy, and I never got past the first boss. The one you can't attack or it'll trigger a counterattack. I didn't know that because I didn't understand the warning given before the fight. I was very young at that time, I found those games boring even outside the "don't understand the language" part. In the beginning I played mostly platformers with little to no reading or dialogue, like Sonic and Crash, and the occasional action game. Later some more dialogue heavy platformers like Spyro, Tomba 2, and movie-licensed games like Toy Story 2. Chrono Cross was the odd one out. I played it before some of these, and I kept bouncing back and forth between Chrono Cross and different games, slowly making progress. The one other JRPG that I remember playing a lot being Legend of Legaia. It was on the PS2 when I felt like I went from "understanding a little" to "understanding most of it", and really expanded the games I played, including getting more of a taste for JRPGs. No doubt, in part because it seemed like most games from that era, be they platformer, fighting game, or whatever, started all being full of dialogue.

 

I think my pronunciation is pretty good. I lived in Japan for a year, and japanese people and non-native english-speaking gaijins would sometimes mistake me for an american. I got a habit during my teens to try and memorize the coolest monologues I heard, and always tried to say it just like I heard it. Ended up working as pronunciation practice.

[brkl]

I teach English in Finland. I think it's easy to start thinking there's something special about games that helps people learn languages. However, I think that's largely bias that comes from our personal history as gamers. Games have a few qualities that are good for language learning, but it's mostly social interaction that you can thank for the excellent language skills some kids have. So it's not playing, usually, but participating in different communities related to gaming. 

 

 

[Roderick]

Cartoon shows and games really put down a foundation for me for learning English. It helped that Holland has a subbing tradition - we don't dub movies in our own language, so we get a lot of pure [American] content on tv. Then it just became the internet in general that further refined my understanding, forums like these.

[osmosisch]

I can only offer anecdotes, in that my younger brother claims to have learned most of his English from playing Magic with me.

 

I personally learn my Eenglish from a booke.

[Ben X]

 

[eot]

I'm learning German right now, I guess I should give this a shot. Games played a big role in me learning English, I'm quite sure of that. Part of it was reading PC gaming magazines, but also talking to people online and so on. Problem is that I hardly ever play games any more.

[Trilderberg]

On 5/9/2018 at 12:31 PM, brkl said:

I teach English in Finland. I think it's easy to start thinking there's something special about games that helps people learn languages. However, I think that's largely bias that comes from our personal history as gamers. Games have a few qualities that are good for language learning, but it's mostly social interaction that you can thank for the excellent language skills some kids have. So it's not playing, usually, but participating in different communities related to gaming. 

 

 

 

I think you're right. Like I was saying, these kids prefer online multiplayer games that you can imagine Russian, preteen shitlords playing. They are not primarily playing immersive, narrative-driven games. So presumably the social aspects of the games could be what's helping them. That said, many of my students that age are involved in some English speaking community online, but they aren't all as proficient as the kids that are focused on games. To me that indicates that something more is happening with the gamer kids.