My group did some investigation about Club Penguin. This application was mostly designed for children. Although it was not aimed for language learning, it still had some pedagogical potential. One of its application is the games in there can be used to expand children's vocabulary. Take the game Smoothie Smash for instance, we can use that to teach the vocal of fruits to children. This method sounds a bit simple, but it is useful because we integrate games into language teaching. In addition, it may be more effective than merely teaching children vocabulary by reading. Some studies have found that children absorb knowledge faster when they are really interested in learning something.
Another application of Club Penguin is we can use it to teach children practical skills in our life. For instance, you can keep pets in this virtual world. In this case, we can teach them how to take care of pet in real life by showing them how to feed a pet. These simple things in Club Penguin can be used in many different ways as long as you are creative.
Aside from exploring these virtual worlds, we also had a discussion about the readings. My group read the article Second language use, socialization, and learning in Internet interest communities and online gaming written by Thorne, Black and Sykes. One thing that interested me was the online learning community. This type of community is beneficial for language learning because it's interest oriented. Having passion about something can really improve learner's efficiency. However, one thing that concerns me is whether this type of community can also hinder learner's language acquisition because some active community members are non native speakers. If they provided problematic feedback in terms of linguistics, would that hamper other learners' learning?
No comments:
Post a Comment