2nd week Reading Reaction

Reaction to "Digital Gaming in L2 Teaching and Learning"

By Reinhardt, J.

With the current trending aim to start making schools and institutions environments where learners do not perceive them as fake due to the differences between what is taught and what students like to do, I consider this bottom-up pedagogical strategy called "digital gaming" is an essential counterpart to traditional pedagogy. In the subsequent paragraphs, you will see that, although I have not incorporated gaming in my teaching practice yet, I have started a little to apply the foundations on which gaming lies.

We all as EFL teachers pursue the fact of creating situated learning spaces for our students to practice and master different school topics. Also, bearing in mind the current social role of SLA in which, through integration of skills, our students are to use the language in context and holistically instead of developing a grammatical competence, I consider that, despite technological resources limitations, we should start seeing games as a socioliteracy practice in which, through technological devices, students can negotiate and develop computational and critical abilities. In the places I have taught, for instance, I have not implemented gaming yet; nonetheless, since last year, I started to help my students enhance their critical thinking abilities by showing them, for example, an authentic video on any issue related to the content we are covering. After the video, I like my students to discuss advantages or disadvantages, compare the video content with their lives, and subsequently do mini-projects that take the form of the redesigned in which they can apply that knowledge to the diversity of real world situations.

There exist two aspects we as teachers have to take into account when designing and implementing games in our rural or urban classrooms. Firstly, make sure that the games are not “chocolate-covered broccoli”, but playful authentic ones so as for our students to get motivated when performing them; otherwise, they will not find any sense and will keep adopting the same old attitudes towards English classes. Secondly, we must consider objective-oriented game tasks that simulate real-world cultural experiences, interactivity, and contextualized meaningful use of L2, and feedback strategies since, in the end, such an implementation aim is to fulfill the requirements to fit in an official school curriculum. Unfortunately, when I worked as a full-time teacher in the private school where I had the opportunity to propose and incorporate gaming in the curriculum, maybe due to time limitations, I did not. However, I say that maybe if I had read literature like this before, I would have found they way to do it. Now, in the institute where I work as a part-time teacher, I do not have the possibility to incorporate such considerations for gaming since there is no unique curriculum as such. Maybe what I can do is take these considerations and implement them into my class plans while also reporting my colleagues how this experience has been in order for them to start implementing gaming.

By the same token, we should not hesitate and concern that because we do not see grammar, vocabulary or listening representations in the games, students will not acquire second language. Instead, we should see the advantages and impact that a playful authentic motivating game has on students’ intercultural competence development, meaning-making processes, ecological well-being, engagement with multimodality, and reinforcement of language learning in real-world contexts. Although I have started to apply a little these considerations and foundations that lie behind gaming, I have failed to widespread my intents. That is, I have very little made my colleagues aware that of sociocultural approaches to teaching and CALL bring about the aforementioned advantages in students’ SLA as well as that traditional pedagogy lying on isolated skills and rote learning is not the only option.

One concern I have after reading this article, though, is the way we are going to assess our students at the end of the school term or course. How can we assess our students after weeks of exposure to an authentic original game that sometimes is not supported on a SLA theory? How come are they to enjoy the chocolate during a period of time and be given a broccoli at the end of it? Maybe we should start working as a group by now in order to come up with hints to answer such questions.

I would also like to remark the benefits these tools have, again, on students’ intercultural competence development and the possibility they provide for them to interact, negotiate meaning, and learn collaboratively to also increase linguistic competence since the interconnection of games can allow two students from different countries and sociocultural background to do these actions. Finally, I am sure I will implement gaming in my practice given the enlightening and insights I gained about it through this literature.