Project Rationale

A classroom can either be a stultifying experience, or it can be a roomful of opportunities to learn. Recent research on game playing suggests that students who use interactive media to practice language do better than those who are taught using drills alone. However, it is not useful for students simply to log in and play any game, because they may not be able to relate these experiences to other classmates, and in doing so, fail to have a reference for themselves or their instructors. Our project will combine a number of different ideas to show how a dynamic classroom can use a coherent strategy consisting of self organizing learning through computer-based learning, and how this can be broadened into a project where students must find and communicate with others, use appropriate language and build skills necessary to further enhance their enjoyment of playing a game in the target language. While the target here will be English, the lesson plan we use can be adapted to any other language, using similar methods. We use as our theoretical base the ideas of Purusotma (2005) and Shaffer (2009), where we are informed by how on-line games can be used pedogogically; Little (2007) for ideas of learner autonomy; and Zheng (2009) to talk about English learning, on-line.
In order to better illustrate how a classroom can use different media, we propose to use a game on Facebook, and illustrate its use for students by playing it ourselves, Facebook is extremely popular around the world. The very popular Facebook application, Farmville, is played by a wide variety of participants with different cultural backgrounds and identities . We have noted that players range from all over, for example South America, Philipines, Vietnam, France. The dominant language of the game is English, and it is within this language people must negotiate to build their farms, hire others to help them, chat about different aspects of the game, and to participate in the community in general. Our lesson will combine three strategies:
- using a MMRPG to communicate
- using the game a topic of communication for students
-encouraging them to blog about their experiences each day
The goals of the lesson will be
-to teach Farmtown vocabularies
- to chat with people in the Inn
- to teach how to hire people make friends and neighbors, and to sell goods.

- to teach how to communicate through indirect speech with appropriate tones, such as
making requests, for example
-to teach how to negotiate their identities while playing different roles, such as an owner or as a helper

As part of our lesson, we will model how these things can be done by playing the game ourselves, and show this model to the students as a means to instruct and to emulate, themselves. We hope to show how an integration of several skills, using a computer based game as a medium of exchange, can serve to make the learning fun, useful, and relevant to the students' lives.