Talk to Me! Games and Students’ Willingness to Communicate

Abstract

In recent years there has been a lot of interest in the potential role of computer games in language education. Playing games is said to be motivating to students and to benefit the development of social skills, such as collaboration, and metacognitive skill, such as planning and organization. An important potential benefit is also that games encourage the use of the target language in a non-threatening environment. Willingness to communicate has been shown to affect L2 acquisition in a number of ways and it is therefore important to investigate if there is a connection between playing games and learners’ interaction in the target language. In this chapter we report on the results of a pilot study that investigated the effects of playing an online multiplayer game on the quantity and quality of L2 interaction in the game and on participants’ willingness to communicate in the target language. We will show that computer games can indeed affect L2 interaction patterns and contribute to L2 acquisition, but that this depends, as in all other teaching and learning environments, on careful pedagogic planning of the activity. 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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