Research, Reflections and Innovations in Integrating ICT in Education
Designing serious games for foreign language education in a global
perspective
Bente Meyer
Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum Studies, School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark
1. Introduction
In this paper I shall explore the challenges of designing game-based material (Serious Games) for language
learning as a specific field of competence. The empirical context of the paper is a Danish project on Serious
Games on a Global Market Place (2007-10) in which academics work with companies to explore, build and
implement game prototypes, using the products and experience of commercial game designers to develop
knowledge about serious game challenges, educational design, and assessment with the aim of innovation. One
aspect of this research consists in exploring how the design of digital games can be developed for classroom
teaching and learning nationally as well as globally.
The paper will explore the question, How can local examples of game-based learning contribute to a global
design of serious games for foreign language education? This question is explored through research done in
Danish classrooms in 2008 and 2009 as well as a study planned in Portuguese classrooms in the spring of 2009.
The platform studied is www.mingoville.com, in Mingoville children ages 9-12 can learn English as a foreign
language online.
2. Overview of the study
In the Serious Games on a Global Market Place project we are focusing on designing games for teaching and
learning. In our research we do both ethnographically inspired classroom studies and platform analysis.
Development of game prototypes is inspired by design based research (Cobb et.al 2003). Our theoretical
framework consists of a combination of game theory, learning theory and theories related to the design of
games for teaching and learning (Dale, 2000, Hopman & Riguarts, 1995; Hiim & Hippe, 1997, Holm Sørensen
2008). In the first phases of our research we have been focusing on the role of serious games in Danish
classrooms, the second phase of the research will move the classroom studies into European classrooms in for
instance Portugal and Sweden. Studies outside Europe will be initiated at a later stage in the project.
The classroom studies mentioned above take a comparative view on gaming as an educational activity
(Osborn 2003, Sørensen 2008). Some of the issues raised by these studies are how national variations in
educational traditions, curriculum, and assessment affect the understanding of serious games and how they can
be researched. The paper will suggest an initial approach to these issues by describing how
www.mingoville.com in the classroom studies mentioned above produced learner participation and learner
involvement in the context of a formal learning environment in Denmark. How did learners respond to the
educational design of the platform in question and how did they perform language learning through the gamebased design of the platform? How did the role of the teacher facilitate different approaches to language learning
in the game-based environment? These questions will be connected to the challenge of studying game-based
learning in a global context.
3. Games in communicative language education
Games may have a number of potentials for foreign or second language learning. Most of these potentials are
associated with the ability of games to provide learning environments that contextualise knowledge and provide
immersive experiences for learners. As suggested by a recent review in Languages, technology and learning
(Milton 2006) learning a language is different from any other subject in the curriculum as it combines explicit
learning of vocabulary and language rules with unconscious skill development in the fluent application of both
these things. For language learners this implies that they should be able to master both grammatical knowledge
and fluency, the latter being often difficult to provide in classrooms where a couple of lessons a week may fail
to provide the meaningful exposure to the foreign language required for learning.
Games and simulations have been part of language learning for decades, and have had a role in supporting
communicative approaches to language learning, i.e. in providing authentic and meaningful opportunities for
language production and use. Game-based language learning has for instance supported fluency and
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Research, Reflections and Innovations in Integrating ICT in Education
communicative competence by letting learners simulate or play real life situations, drama or narrative (Crookall
2007, Li & Topolewski 2002, Crookall & Oxford 1990). In addition to this puzzles and minigames such as
Hangman have been used to enhance vocabulary acquisition and use. In this sense games have been associated
with a move from the teaching of discrete grammatical structures to the promotion of communicative ability
(Warschauer & Kern 2000, 1). According to Macedonia (2005) games may serve to proceduralise foreign
language knowledge, i.e. to encourage and support fluency against the generally rule-based, declarative
approach to foreign language teaching. In moving from declarative to precedudural knowledge game-based
language learning may serve to provide practice as well as a basis for the repetition of grammatical structures in
the foreign language.
In Denmark foreign language education is a central part of the curriculum, as Danish citizens, being speakers
of a minority language, need foreign language competence to communicate, learn and interact in a number of
contexts at home and abroad. In primary schools children are taught English from the 3rd form (9 years age
group) and German and French from the 7th or 8th form (13-14 years age group).
Denmark has a long tradition for communicative foreign language education. This means that English is
generally taught in English, teaching materials are as a rule authentic, and language activities are contextualised
and related to everyday activities. In addition to this there is a focus on adapting instruction and learning to the
needs of the individual learner. This implies that pupils are viewed as children who are motivated by and learn
through play, musical and creative activities (Danish Ministry of Education 2009). In the 3rd form pupils will
therefore generally have their first school based encounters with the English language through for instance
songs, rhymes, dialogue, minigames and roleplay. Receptive skills are given priority in the first phases of
learning the language, which means that listening is central activity in the classroom. Text material is not
generally given priority in the classroom in the first phases of learning the language. Finally, there is an
awareness of the fact that children do not necessarily learn their initial English vocabulary in school, i.e. that
many children learn English at an early age through the media, for instance television, films, music and
computer games. This means that instruction and learning must relate to the fact that some learners have already
acquired vocabulary and initial communicative experience when they start learning English in school.
The principles for beginner’s education in English in Danish primary schools to some extent facilitate the use
of games in the classroom. As mentioned above games have been part of language education for decades, and
playful and creative approaches to learning the language are generally accepted both in formal and informal
learning contexts. However, computer games have never had a central position in foreign language education,
and schools and teachers are to some extent sceptical of the educational role of digital games. This may be due
to what de Castell and Jenson call the “dominant cultural (op)positioning of play and education” (de Castell &
Jenson 2003, 654), i.e. the fact that play and gaming are understood as representing childish activities that are
potentially disruptive and antithetical to schooling. Gaming is, as claimed by de Castell and Jenson, a
fundamentally unpopular culture in schools, a fact that influences teachers’ views on gaming as well as their
practice (de Castell & Jenson 2003). The role of the teacher as a gate keeper and negotiator of game-based
instruction and learning is, as I will argue below, one of the central aspects of assessing and designing serious
games for language learning in a global context.
4. Children’s gaming and learning activities in the Mingoville sessions
As described above it has been the intention of the research project to develop the initial design of the
Mingoville.com platform by testing and revising ideas about game-based language learning and teaching
through an ongoing analysis of the platform itself, its genesis as well as pupils’ interaction and learning with the
platform.
In Mingoville children of 9-11 years meet the Pinkeltons, who are citizens of the simulated world Mingoville
– a city inhabited by flamingos. The platform is built on a narrative concept and contains 10 Missions that take
the learners through a variety of themes such as The Family, Colours and Clothes, Numbers and Letters. The
Mingoville platform can be described not as a full game in itself, but rather as a web-based learning
environment that capitalises on the mini-games and other entertainment activities that children engage in in their
spare time outside school. In an earlier paper I have identified the Mingoville platform as an example of what
Ang & Zaphiris have named an extrinsic game type, i.e. “a structured series of puzzles or tasks embedded in a
game or narrative structure with which they have only the most slender connection” (Ang & Zaphiris 2006, 10,
Meyer & Holm Sørensen 2008).
Following the analysis of the Mingoville platform in the autumn of 2007, the second phase of research in
Mingoville.com was piloted in the spring of 2008 through two classroom studies, both in suburban schools near
Copenhagen. The purpose of these studies was to observe user performance and response to the platform and to
compare these with the learning theories and design principles embedded in the platform. Design for teaching
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and learning is to some extent largely a conceptual matrix that must be tested against the real work and learning
done by users (Cobb et.al 2003).
In the classroom sessions with Mingoville.com the extrinsic design of the platform, i.e. the mixture of tasks
and exercises available on the platform became extremely significant in the learning activities and in the pace
and rhythm of interaction and learning exhibited by learners. The extrinsic platform design for instance
generally inspired learners, if they found the opportunity, to choose the most playful and game-like activities
rather than activities that were more obviously school related. The playful and game-like activities chosen by
learners would generally be activities that most clearly resembled the mini-games played by children on free
websites in their spare time. This choice was made possible by the direct reference to these out of school
activities in the platform and was most obvious in the 5th form class where the teacher had allowed the pupils to
choose freely between the activities in the platform. In the 4th form class where pupil activities were generally
structured and supervised by the teacher this was less obvious, though still observable. The tendency of the
children to prefer the most game- and play-like activities specifically highlighted the role of the teacher as a
mediator between game activities and learning activities and allowed us to observe how the negotiation of
gaming activity and learning activity was initiated through the game-based platform in the classroom.
One example of a game-based activity that was chosen by a number of children was a Pacman spelling game
in which the learner leads the Pacman through a labyrinth to select and ’eat’ the exact letters that make up a
certain word (for instance “parrot”, or “cat”). The Pacman game is used in several of the platform missions, and
was hugely popular with the children in the classes that we observed. Also, this was the task that almost all
children would complete and play several times, even though they had obviously ‘learned’ the spelling of the
words in question. In the interviews almost all children said that they felt they learned to spell English words
from playing this game, and that they chose it because it was great fun to play.
http://www.dk.mingoville.com/ - #http://www.dk.mingoville.com/ - #Other game-like or playful activities
that children would choose was for instance a game in which one of the Mingos had to catch specific vegetables
(for instance carrots) rather than others (for instance tomatoes) in his shopping basket to match the word spelled
on the left hand side of the screen. In the 5th form more traditional school like tasks were sometimes chosen, one
example of this was a spelling task where one of the Mingos prompts the user to spell a word from a group of
letters given in random order. As a clue for the pupil the word is pronounced by the Mingo who is standing in
teacher position at a blackboard, pointer in hand. In the interviews children from the 5th form told us that they
liked this task because it helped them to acquire a competence that they felt was not generally trained in school,
i.e. the spelling of English words. It seems that pupils were attracted to this task because it explicitly referred to
a learning context that they could identify with and learn from. In this sense pupils were motivated by the clear
reference to formal learning tasks, in the same way that they were attracted to the obvious gaming reference of
other tasks.
For teachers, using the game-based platform in class was sometimes a real challenge. In the 5th form class,
pupils were understood by teachers to be working on learning the language, but they were also to some extent
understood to be exercising their out of school identities as players and gamers while interacting with the
platform, and thereby bringing unsolicited and unwanted entertainment into the classroom. On the one hand
teachers acknowledged that gaming, including the Pacman activity, could facilitate vocabulary acquisition and
spelling, on the other hand the role of the teacher was often to slow down the pace of playing and interacting
and to encourage pupils to concentrate, repeat and persist. Often teachers would insist, when they were guiding
or supervising individual pupils, that pupils should engage in introductions to tasks and other kinds of
preparatory work that children were more likely to skip in order to move on to ‘real’ task interaction. In this
sense teachers were trying to reconceptualise gaming as a profound or ‘serious’ learning activity based on
concentration and perseverance, in which a linear process of solving and understanding tasks should generally
be observed.
In the 4th form classroom gaming was from the beginning conceptualised as a learning activity by the teacher
which allowed the children to understand gaming as a teacher controlled activity from the outset. In the 4th form
class where the teacher had pre-selected the tasks, pupils were much more likely to work through the tasks and
to do this in the order suggested by the teacher, though a number of the children also chose to do the tasks in the
order that seemed interesting to them. The attention span of these children was generally longer than that of the
5th formers, also their pace of learning and interacting with the platform was much more relaxed than the 5th
formers, who would typically move quickly through the tasks, and often skipped from the platform menu to
individual tasks as described above. Whereas it may be argued that these differences in attention span and
platform response could be due to age differences, 4th formers were also observed to prefer the most playful
tasks and to have little patience with tasks that were too ‘bookish’. In addition to this, some 4th formers would
do ‘entertaining’ tasks (for instance the Pacman task) that they were not asked to do, in these cases the teacher
said that they we allowed to work on tasks of their own choice when they had finished what they had been asked
to do. Gaming in this sense often worked as a reward after ‘learning’.
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5. Conclusions
This paper has suggested an initial approach to the analysis and development of game-based language learning
based on empirical studies done in Danish primary school classrooms. The studies above point to a number of
challenges involved in designing game-based material for language learning and teaching in a global
perspective.
First of all there is the challenge of balancing local perspectives on serious games with cross-national
principles for using and designing game-based teaching and learning. As suggested by for instance Sørensen
(2008) the national focus of most comparative studies can be criticised, however, national curricula often do
establish the boundaries for teaching and learning in classrooms. As described above, Denmark has a tradition
for using a playful approach when introducing children to the foreign language, and for recognising the role of
ICTs and media in children’s vocabulary acquisition and communicative competence. However, there also
seems to be a somewhat sceptical attitude among especially teachers towards the use and usefulness of games in
the classroom. This may be a general challenge for game-based learning as suggested by for instance de Castell
and Jenson (2003), however, there are also local issues involved. One issue of this kind is the local practice and
approach to foreign language education, another is the design of the platform or game involved and how this
complies with innovative approaches or the needs of teachers and learners.
Secondly, the question of how game-based teaching and learning is interpreted and implemented is to a large
degree dependent on teachers, as teachers are generally the gate keepers of the learning culture. As suggested by
de Castell and Jenson (2003), it is usually the role of the teacher and the school to establish boundaries and
define ‘no go’ zones for learners, often with the result that learners’ freedom of movement in physical and
virtual space is restricted. In addition to this teaching can be said to be a changing profession that to an
increasing extent is subject to pressure from larger political and societal agendas. This is true in for instance
Portugal as well as in Denmark (Day et al 2007, Flores 2005). These restrictions and changing
conceptualisations of teacher as well as learner roles may determine whether learners can become ‘full
participants’ (Lave & Wenger 1991) in a game-based learning culture that is often designed and conceptualised
as playful and immersive. It can be argued that for language education participation is a central issue if the aim
of teaching and learning is promoting communicative ability. Future studies of the role of the teacher in gamebased learning will determine how local and global perspectives on teacher practice and professionalism affects
the role and design of game-based language learning.
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