| Body | by Julie M. Sykes, CASLS, University of Oregon
Have you ever wondered why so many people spend so much time playing digital games? What gets them playing? What keeps them playing? What does this mean for us as language teachers? Among the many complex components that make games engaging, a core element is goal-orienting behavior. In other words, good games are especially effective at pushing people to meet a long, complicated, integrated series of goals in their own way.
Whether or not we actually use digital games in the language classroom, what we know about goal-orienting behavior and its critical role in game play experiences can inform our own teaching and learning in a number of ways.
- Goal setting as a dynamic, negotiated, and continuous process. Helping students become self-driven learners engaged in the learning process is key to successful long-term outcomes. Good digital games engage their players right away by offering a series of level-appropriate tasks from which learners can choose. From this perspective, players drive the experience, but ultimately arrive at the same intended outcomes as those presented by the designers. Furthermore, they are permitted to change course midstream if the task is not meeting their larger goals. In the classroom, this behavior can be facilitated through learner choice and learner-driven goal setting that informs classroom activity. For example, after having learners identify relevant CanDo statements for the coming month, they could each be asked to create an activity that would target the specific language function. They would then engage in a series of the five or ten peer-created activities that were most relevant to them. The instructor would then have the opportunity to ensure the required objectives were being met through a larger task at the end of the unit. In this way, learners would know their target and be assessed on their ability to meet the target, but would have freedom in how they chose to reach the target.
- Failure is a critical learning mechanism. The goal-orienting behavior found in digital games demonstrates an important lesson about failure – it is key to learning. Players are encouraged to take risks and fail through the presentation of goals that may be a little above their gameplay ability. As a result, players learn the skills necessary to complete the tasks, often by repeating the activity multiple times in multiple ways. As instructors, we can encourage risk taking by creating space for failure to result in learning. For example, we can allow the repetition of certain tasks throughout the week or month leading up to a unit assessment. This encourages learners to keep trying until they are able to complete the tasks and allows them to take risks prior to arriving at a high stakes assessment. In addition, they build the skills to “constantly reassesses abilities, risks, challenges, and rewards” (Sykes and Reinhardt, 2012, p. 20) as part of their language learning experiences.
While these two elements are not the only components of goal-oriented behavior, they are noteworthy examples of goal-orienting behavior in digital spaces relevant to classroom practice.
Reference:
Sykes, J. & Reinhardt, J. (2012). Language at Play: Digital Games in Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning. Series on Theory And Practice In Second Language Classroom Instruction, J. Liskin-Gasparro & M. Lacorte, series eds. Pearson-Prentice Hall.
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