Time will tell: In-game social interactions that facilitate second language acquisition

Abstract

Prior research indicates that gameplay experiences attributed to Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) foster foreign language students' ability to communicate with players in the target language. We take a closer look at the role of language socialization in MMORPGs, specifically dialogue between native and non-native speakers. We modify the Dialogue Acts Markup in Several Layers code scheme to represent in-game social interactions and apply this code scheme to players' game dialogue. We then develop ClockWerk©, an evaluation tool that visually depicts communication patterns of game dialogue attributed to MMORPGs. ClockWerk© graphically detects dominant behaviors of linguistically diverse groups of players over time. ClockWerk© enables users to temporally correlate the type of social interactions with gameplay activities, gauging their impact on second language acquisition. Copyright 2009 ACM.