So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of people doing "online commentary" as they play Minecraft? They certainly put you squarely in the learner's seat when confronted by such materials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz5mnohamv8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz5mnohamv8
IMO, the videos with "online commentary" are of little pedagogic value. The "tutorials" are better.
ReplyDeleteAs an absolute beginner in regards to Japanese, Game Play commentary is just a lot of annoying noise. One important factor in my opinion is that I am a real beginner, I never learned the language and I was never exposed to it in any substantial way. I personally would start by learning some sentences and phrases, and find some songs or movies to get used to the sounds of the language.
ReplyDeleteThe Spanish I may actually be interested in to practice, but it will obviously depend on how interesting, entertaining and useful the commentary is. Yesterday I actually listened to an Italian one that I stumbled upon while looking for some tutorials. I found it useful to practice listening and as a refresher but, I couldn't take more than 10 minutes of it for several reasons.
In general I agree with you about tutorials but they are usually monologues. Game Play commentary provide a different type of language and can be entertaining as well as useful for someone who's interested in playing the game. In fact I know that some kids started playing a game after watching those Game Plays, especially the walk through ones.
We should separate the videos where two or more players are INTERACTING in the game from the ones where a single player is providing a running monolog of comments about what's going on. The former are of much more interest.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like they are learning and having fun. I only watched a little but they will soon learn to build a scaffold they can destroy later to construct their temple. Perhaps they might research how the ancients might have done it.
ReplyDeleteThe point isn't whether these paid entertainers are learning to play MC, but whether language learners viewing this video can effectively learn language from watching it. Sure, there might be something to be learned from listening to such banter...but there must be many other far better sources of language input.
ReplyDeleteDid you also listen to the single-player commentaries in the Hindi and Arabic videos? I don't think there's much language learning potential in those.
BTW, from the moment you wrote "Sure" (even before looking at the rest of the post) I knew that you would be disagreeing. : ) . I wonder how many English learners are away of things like that.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Did you notice you did it first? "Sure....but..." I like our discussions. It gives me a clearer idea why we're analyzing these videos. You know, I always question why textbooks need to teach these exact questions: "What is this?" "Is this a pen?" "What color is this?" "What time do you go to bed?" (the list goes on) and not other interrogative sentences. So I'd like to compile the set of questions that players ask during game play. I was also interested in cartoons because Mattie grew up watching blues clues, mickey mouse club house, the cat in the hat, and Thamas and friends (the trains). I wanted to compile a cartoon corpus and analyze it as well. Okay...I'm going off topic.
ReplyDeleteThis semester I taught an entire course as an exploration of questions-that-aren't-really-questions, that is question that are primarily vehicles for other social actions or interactional goals. For example, "Why weren't you..." is hearable as a "complaint" or even accusation and regularly get treated as such in the next turn. There are so many of the non-questioning questions that actual questions ('requests for information") are perhaps in the minority. Even what is ostensively a "question," for example, "What time does store close" can be heard to be doing something else...like saying "HURRY UP, WE'RE LATE! If fact, just last month I was invited to give a 2-hour workshop on this topic to local EFL teachers.
ReplyDeleteAs for why standard EFL texts teach "Is this a pen" and "What is this? there are two answers. First, the words in these fairly useless questions are just placeholders in a syntactic formula, the old "boxes" approach to teaching syntax. This is a pen = Subject + Verb + (Article) + (Noun/Object). It is assumed that once students can say "This is a pen" they will be able to plug in other vocab items to make useful statements.
But really the main reason is that overwhelmingly consciously or unconsciously the vast majority of English teachers world wide are still teaching questions based on 1960's transformational thinking. This is a pen --> . Is this a pen? Even teachers who have never heard of Noam Chomsky or Transformational Generative grammar teach questions by transformation. This is almost certainly NOT how native speakers create questions (And it sure isn't how passive statements are created.) This transformational approach leads to students forming stupid questions like "Are you a teacher?" They ask these stupid questions because they can formulate a statement about something that they know to be true, which is what statements are, and then they have been trained to transform statements into questions like algebra equations. EFL textbooks also teach questions primarily a syntactic structures rather than from a functional perspective.
Now I'm finished with my rant about teaching questions. Back to our regularly scheduled programming. LOL.
There are so many things to analyze. For now we should focus on 1) our CA analysis of game-play and 2) the vocab frequency analysis of YT videos. Of course, we will each have other side projects going, for example, I'm supposed to put together a chapter on proto-narratives in L2 talk.
ReplyDeleteBut once we have a corpus of talk we can examine it for all sorts of things, including questions of different types and what those questions might have been doing.
BTW, here are two CA papers that EVERY SINGLE ESL/EFL teacher in the world needs to read. You will never view or teach questions (or answering) the same.
Hayano, K. (2013). Question design in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lee, S. (2013). Response design in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/1_c8coPWNpcteJPVviyNyVgfGrcj9HdmmMWuxA1oc4iX9G6tYyb62j3n-B8BqfinUZk902EvBAuD75W1ZlCZjzI9bF52EYJKzIs=s0
ReplyDeleteInteresting! Feb 4 was last month!! I'll check the library to see if they have this book.
ReplyDelete