Watch an episode of television where specific societal problems are discussed.
This can be a show with a political pundit, a talk show with a panel, or a show that puts a
rhetorical spin on traditional news. Analyze the discussion considering the major claims,
evaluating the evidence, and identifying declared or hidden assumptions. You also need to
analyze how the oral format contributed to the success or failure of the show. You can consider
your thesis an interpretive evaluation.
in-game worlds were relatively fixed and did not have much depth whatsoever, enabling the player only to play out the action of a pre-programmed story.
Today, nonetheless, according to Hansson (2005) games are presumably more open-ended, with many of them encouraging players to take an active role in the construction of the game itself through the use of various ‘mod’ tools. The term ‘mod’ means modification, in videogame terms ‘mod’ refers to a user made add-on to an already existing game. For example, one of 2007’s best selling video games, “The Sims 2” does not determine any explicit goal or winning outcome. Rather, the game presents itself as an open-ended “virtual doll house” in which users play out and share stories with one another should they choose to.
As a result of the enormous flexibility of this game, thousands of players’ created content add-ons or game modifications now available for free on the web. “Surprisingly enough, so far, little has been attempted by educators to use the extensive mod tools available for The Sims 2 to implement learning content in a way that naturally integrates with the in-game experience” (Goldfayn, 2006).
However, mod tools provide full access to all the language data used in all the different international versions of a game. This allows curriculum designers to easily manipulate popular video games to create opportunities for foreign language learning. Johnson,( 2005, p.191) claims that for most educational disciplines, “the main rule when choosing a video game to be modded is that the closer the original contents of the game are to the educational discipline involved, the smoother the process will be”. Most people play video games nowadays and everyone seems to work on a computer, so learning a foreign language through video games can be as viable as learning it through traditional classroom instruction.
For example, in order to make a game like “Civilization III” relevant to a history classroom, one simply needs to edit a few maps, scenarios and variables; while a game like The Sims 2 actually does have a distinct similarity between the contents of the game and the contents of an introductory language textbook (parts of the body, furnishing the house, finding a job/professions, emotions, etc), the fact that almost all games use language in one way or another allows a far wider range of games to be modded for usage in foreign language learning than other educational disciplines.
4. – Modding in ESL
There has been a recent increase in the number of game environments or engines that allow users to customize their gaming experiences by building and expanding game behavior. What is described here is the use of modifying, or modding, existing games as a means to learn English. A case of game modding in classroom settings is described to illustrate skills learned by students as a result of modding existing games, in this case the game which was modded is “The Sims 2”.
Below are some examples of how you can mod a videogame to suit your needs as a teacher as well as your students’. These are two sample activities that have been put into practice by teachers such as Mylene Catel, (http://www.mylenejcatel.com/)whohave put an enormous amount of effort into this. Simply by playing the modded version of the game (The Sims 2), students are gradually exposed to heavy amounts of reading practice in the foreign language. However, designing specific reading comprehension tasks helps the teacher assess learning better. Next, I describe an activity which can be performed using the previously mentioned game:
Sample Solution
