I convinced the day job to let me write about video games on company time and set about offering some suggestions on how to use video games to learn English.
It’s definitely possible -submersing yourself in any form of media will give you the edge when it comes to learning another language. The frustrating thing is that video games have a real potential to be more than that and I’m yet to see a developer successfully pulling it off.
Admittedly, maybe attempting to learn English through Telltale’s Game of Thrones might be a little on the ambitious side.
What’s more, the success of apps like Duolingo show there’s a real market for interactive media that teaches these things and video games have so much potential to really react to the individual student.
It is not just languages either. I remember surprising my parents that I knew the seven wonders of the world in a pub quiz when I was quite young, purely through playing Civilization 2. However, it can extent beyond the simple delivery of fact. The fact that games have to teach the player how to play them in the first place makes it clear that they are excellent educational tools for teaching abstract concepts and skills in general.
There’s precedent for people using video games in the classroom too. A recent example is Minecraft which has started to pop up in classroom environments and is bound to get children engaged in their lessons.
I sometimes rattle on about the excellent Extra Credits whenever I get the opportunity, but I’ll leave you with an excellent episode of theirs explaining just how effective games could be at teaching and adapting to individual students.