Hi all. Let me introduce myself (perhaps to my discredit) quickly. I'm a 25 year old grad student starting my PhD in Instructional Technology. This means I basically have nil experience when compared with all you old pros and, since I'm at the beginning of my program, will likely never get any real experience (because we all know the truth of that dog character's line in the Treasure Planet cartoon, "I'm not a doctor. Well, I have a doctorate, but you can't do anything with that. You just sit at a desk and are useless!"). However, over the course of the past 6 years, I have lived in Brazil and Mexico and taught English for about half of that and married a Chilean I met here in the U.S.
With that said, let me throw a few things into this wonderfully interesting debate (which has sidetracked me from doing a teacher-training course for the past hour. My, how we SLA teachers are long-winded!) Take the following for what you will.
First: Way back when, Larry said:
what we really need to do in our classrooms is get students to think about English. This means they have to ponder, contemplate, mull over, chew on, reflect deeply, speculate. It's a personal activity. Errors are useful here. Games, while they may be fun, do not generally provide the proper atmosphere for that. Not that there is no place for fun in the process, as long as there is genuine introspection about English. There needs to be a sense of discovery, of progress. Endless repetition is of questionable value. Getting our students to think, at least much of the time, would surely be better. The question is, how do we do that?
I have one suggestion of how you
could do that (I know there are many). Have you tried using online forums to augment your students' experience? One very good and free one for teachers is NiceNet.org. It was made for the express purpose of allowing teachers to create discussions for each of their classes and, as such, has no ads and is free. One way to use this to "get students to think about English" is to perhaps align it with a course-long theme. Say, perhaps, your students are studying about a certain author, genre, or country. Maybe they're going to travel to that country at the end of the year. You could use the forum to generate out-of-class discussion. Students could be split into groups and communicate their findings this way. Students could research which cities they want to visit on their trip to their desired country and debate it over the forum. This, of course, should be accompanied and integrated in class. This is just one example, but you all can see for yourselves the efficiency of online forums in generating discussion, and therefore introspection, on even a single topic. This could really get students thinking
in the target language and not just about it.
If any of you have tried this, I'd be really interested in your discoveries (both good and bad). I challenge those of you who haven't to give it a go. It's a great way to generate discussion both in and out of class.
Second: One of my interests in Instructional Technology is game theory. I agree with the concensus opinion of this forum that games can be great if carefully selected and used. One thing Larry stated that he didn't like about games (before his inner reflection) was that there's typically no room for errors, which, I agree, are necessary in SLA. I participated in an online scholarly debate just last week that discussed games in ed. and one very interesting point was the nature of games (video) nowadays as opposed to those 30 years ago. The winners of video games used to be whoever was bigger, faster, stronger. Now, though, games reward all sorts of different behavior and non-linear thinking such as searching every nook and cranny, winning a war without killing anybody, taking the long way around, and everyone's personal favorite, breaking the rules (which gets you into all sorts of secret worlds and powers, interestingly enough). Granted, most ESL classroom games I've seen take more of the traditional approach of bigger, faster, stronger. The question I submit is, what if the game takes a more modern appraoch such as the one described above? Is that appropriate for SLA classrooms? If so, how and is it worth the time it takes to make it really effective?
Without anwering my own question, I would say the debate over games is somewhat semantic. I think what many (at least on this forum) are aiming for, is the intrinsic motivation attached to games. Now, whether a gaming approach stimulates deep thought is left to be seen and needs a lot more studying.
So, who's game (no pun intended)? I know I'm a rookie so help me out.
Point taken!
No doubt the language found there is better than what is usually found in textbooks.
Why would you want to do this? It's all part of the attempt to raise your students' level of awareness of English.
Can anyone imagine a bored teacher with a room full of enraptured students???
)
