Digital Games and ELT: Bridging the Authenticity Gap

Abstract

In this chapter I will suggest that in cultural contexts such as Sweden, where English is an integral part of young people’s everyday lives and is encountered and used in a range of out-of-school domains, a particular challenge facing teachers is not so much generating motivation to succeed in long-term competency goals, but rather engaging students in day-to-day classroom activities. Based on the idea that self-authenticity can have a motivating force (Gecas, 1991; Vannini, 2006; Vannini & Burgess, 2009) and drawing on James Paul Gee’s recent work on affinity spaces (Gee, 2005; Hayes & Gee, 2010), I will argue that teachers of English need to create learning opportunities whereby students can experience the types of creative and self-relevant interaction commonplace in digital gaming. This does not mean that teachers should look to leisure-time domains with an eye to the wholesale import of youth culture content into the classroom but, rather, that greater scope should be given to aesthetic and personal expression in activity design. In arguing that there is a growing authenticity gap between the English that students learn in school and the English they use outside, I will begin the chapter by looking at the sorts of things young people in Sweden do in their free time. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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