Brain Training for Languages

Game Announce: Learn Foreign Languages On Your DS

So the gaming in education craze is hitting languages. Now I am not a fan of gaming per se. For one I am utterly useless and secondly the word gaming brings up images of those killing and car jacking games that all my students talk about. BUT I am prepared to open my mind and think about the uses of appropriate games to aid in the teaching and learning of languages. Having watched Derek Robertson of LTScotland on the BBC (thanks to Ewan's handy recording) I was rather impressed by the work that is going on via Consularium.

On first thoughts something like this could be an excellent way of acquiring vocab, especially if you could set the game to work on vocab pertaining to a specific topic. I wouldn't be averse to trying out this kind of thing for say 5-10 minutes at the beginning of each lesson or every other lesson. Plus it appears the games are being developed with Berlitz, therefore there will be some serious language learning content...I would hope.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not advocating that this kind of approach should over take teacher based language teaching, but it could be an enjoyable yet useful addition to a teachers tool box. (Nightmare for security though...count them in and count them back...)

Virgin and Berlitz are planning a series of games (going under the title of Mind Your Language with Spanish and English being the first releases (due this summer) and French, German and Japanese to follow in autumn.






It will be interesting to see whether these games have a similar sort of impact on the general populace as the Brain Training games have had.

By the way if you get to read this Derek, I'd be prepared to trial these games in my class if you wanted to set up a project...


Learn Another Language On Your Nintendo DS ~ Game Invasion

Technorati Tags: nintendo, nintendods, mindyourlanguage, derekrobertson, gaming, consolarium

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