The SIMS as a educational tool

Ravi Purushotma (MIT) comments in an article how games and technology can help learners, specifically adolescents, to improve their foreign language skills. He starts his commentary expounding his own experience in learning German in high school. He explains how tedious and frustrating it was to learn German and he relates the horrible experience he went through while he was learning German as a second language.

Purushotma explains how entertainment games can be modified for language learning purposes without sacrificing the entertainment value. Because of this marriage of education and entertainment he brings up the new term edutainment, which is a merge between education and entertainment. However, we have to be cautious and do not fall in the error of doing something that does not achieve the goal in education, focusing only in the entertainment part. Both terms must be balanced in order to attain pedagogical goals through entertainment.

This paper provides examples of embedding language instruction into games, Web browsing, and music. The author gives some examples and their pedagogical implications.

Purushotma starts with a commentary of the famous game The Sims®. The Sims® is a game designed to emulate normal everyday life. You can have a look in the official Web page at The SIMS and judge yourself about the visual and pedagogical implications. The author explains that the possibility of editing the language data in the game allows learners to use the target language. According to Hulstijn (1992) the modification of video games can result on incidental learning. Furthermore, pop-up explanations available for player and the software can be programmed to show two meanings for the same word therefore, the player (learner) has to choose which is appropriate for the context.

Purushotma gives an example of incidental learning when browsing the Web. He suggests that he replaced his ‘throbber’ with German vocabulary, as online flash cards. Hence, instead of seeing a commercial or corporate logo he could see a German word (with the corresponding translation) and an image while loading the web. Furthermore, if the learner makes his own flash cards for the ‘throbber’ s/he will retain that vocabulary better (Nikolova, 2002).

Who did not look for the lyrics of a song in another language? A very well known activity when learning a second language is looking up the lyrics of a song. It is great when learners can follow a song through synchronized lyrics and uses translator to look up unfamiliar words. Learners can use OCR-capable translator and with some programs as Winamp you are able to synchronize your lyrics. Please have a look in an intelligent file made by Purushotma here:

http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/creating_synced_lyrics.wmv

Their pedagogical implications are quite clear, namely, exposition to oral input which heightens their listening proficiency, learning new lexical items, as well as cultural aspects of the new language.

To conclude this commentary of the commentary of Purushotma, we have to take into account that technology is an integral part of our everyday life. Because of this, it must also be incorporated into everyday educational life as “edutainment” which ultimately allows the world’s worst foreign language learner to enjoy learning a foreign language.

References:

• Purushotma, R. (2005). Commentary: You're not studying, you're just…, Language Learning & Technology 9, 80-96. http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/pdf/purushotma.pdf

• Nikolova, O. R. (2002). Effects of students' participation in authoring of multimedia materials on student acquisition of vocabulary. Language Learning & Technology, 6(1), 100-122. Retrieved October 4, 2003, from http://llt.msu.edu/vol6num1/NIKOLOVA/

• Hulstijn, J. H. (1992). Retention of inferred and given meanings: Experiments in incidental vocabulary learning. In P. J. L. Arnaud & H. Béjoint (Eds.), Vocabulary and applied linguistics (pp. 113-125). London: Macmillan.

• The Sims® http://thesims2.ea.com/

• A replacement of your ‘throbber’: http://www.langwidge.com/langwidge_while_you_browse.html