The last guilty game of Hangman

Reading time: 8 minutes

I drew my little stickman hanging from a noose.

“You have to guess the word or he dies!” I challenge my students who look equal parts mortified and amused.

I recalled a comment I read about the morbid origins of the game, originating in 17th century England and its potential continuity into slavery and colonialism.

It’s just a game, I argued to myself lamely, knowing full well that I was engaging a room full of unsuspecting english learners in a vestigial part of history that I actively wanted to gut out of my life. Since then, I decided EFL games were grossly outdated and have been searching for alternatives that are actually gamified and based in learning, rather than perpetuating leftover neocolonial practices.

Spaces of exploration and play,

Not having an authority figure judging your facial expressions allowed students to loosen up behind screens, as they responded with heart emojis, thumbs up signs and in-chat banter.

EFL can be nightmare enough for in-person lessons, the thought of blank and counter-intuitive black screens of impassivity only added to my anxiety during Co-Vid lockdown classes. But all it took was a single lesson before I realized this was the opposite. Not having to look at impassive faces allowed me to focus on the lesson itself. It forced me to think of other ways of communicating with my students, who, being Japanese, associate impassive faces with a sincerity towards learning. Fun is for joking around, after classes. Not having an authority figure judging your facial expressions allowed students to loosen up behind screens, as they responded with heart emojis, thumbs up signs and in-chat banter.

Honestly, it was revelatory for me.

Co-Vid’s shockwaves on the education industry in Japan (and all over the world) helped accelerate and sharpen the width of my search towards specific adaptable principles that could translate into different spheres of learning. I had to learn to distill game settings and features into foundational principles that would work for a number of discourse methods, such as this amazing wheel spinner, as well as this incredible bingo generator that you can also play online. Thinking of interactivity rather than straight gameplay made it easier to deduce the kinds of tech that I could utilize.

After in-person classes resumed, I continued to employ the Wheel Spinner with a projector. The getting voluntold aspect of in-class learning transforming into randomized lottery selection made my students feel a little less picked on, instead setting up a subversive space for exploration and play.

A glorified flash card app to promote learning and motivation,

If an educator can grasp [this] first principle, content delivery is just a matter of creativity.

Soon enough I found a better way to deliver my lexical learning activities rather than printing stacks and stacks of paper. Quizlet.

From the outset, Quizlet is a glorified flashcard app. But educators who are looking for modes of play that curry information within a variety of learning methods will understand what it means to be able to find a piece of tech that allows you to utilize your material within their learning framework. At its very core, Quizlet is a way to connect two concepts in a format that uses mimicry, spaced-repetition and rapid testing of knowledge to enforce learning. If an educator can grasp this first principle, content delivery is just a matter of creativity.

For me, I was already looking for a way to make the material my students were learning in other classes more accessible. I have no delusions about making my junior high students into fluent native speakers. The intention was for them to enjoy the language and challenge themselves in a safe, non-judgmental space. That means, accessibility through different learning formats, through different discourse methods. Including gamification.

I tasked my club members to make and manage posts on our blog page on which I embedded Quizlet’s Spell test and they could not have been more excited to have a method of learning spelling that instantaneously told them if they were right or wrong, checked their spelling and read out the correct pronunciation out loud, focused on growth instead of judgement. It didn’t matter that they initially got 4 out of 10 correct, they just kept going until the leaderboard read a satisfactory number reflective of their growth.

The principles of incorporating exploratory and playful EFL gamification based on trust,

Fujimoto Toru, at University of Tokyo claims that when we engage students in a “magic circle”, they create a space of understanding that separates their consciousness from inside and outside the game(*). He presses on to say that it must be divorced from ‘real life’ and must not be set up as a ‘productivity’ based experience, but rather a separate reality in which learning is simply tangential, a by-product.

I read a translation of this case study so perhaps I might not have a holistic understanding of his study, moreover the study was conducted in 2015, so I’m inclined to disagree with his assertion. Maybe a traditional perspective on a gamified classroom setting might set up students to believe that they are entering a space that is divorced from regular learning, but each succeeding generation has a stronger foothold in the digital realm than the last. The question of “divorced from reality” is moot when we’re trying to deliver content via virtual reality, when curation and influence is a form of currency on social media platforms.

The study does make some interesting statements regarding setting up principles and boundaries to comprise play and exploration. For example;

Clear objectives and rules.
If subconsciously, our EFL classes have a tacit understanding that active participation is expected once we engage in game-based activities. Even the sleepiest and inert of students know and innately understand this because often gameplay relies on team work and accountability. Something Japanese students are already familiar with.
It requires everyone to be a player.

Participants are not forced to participate, but take part voluntarily.
I’ll be real, I don’t give my students the option to opt out of activities, however I do make sure they have control over the degree of participation they want to engage with. It has been to my benefit to not enforce an “average WPM” in reading tests and rather focus on the game aspect of it. You read, and the app scores you. If you’re satisfied with it then good for you, but if not, you could try to hit specific fluency milestones.

It (gamification) is based on elements of play such as competition, imitation and unusualness.
I’ve found that students also retain information in EFL best when it comes from peers. I use a game learning program called GimKit to deliver quiz-style questions that enforce learned material. I used to make it a pen-paper affair until I realized how much they felt like it was a test and of how little use it was because they couldn’t learn the answer until the activity was done and then it was too late to retain the information long term. Learning then, would have to take place in a different time, in a different space.

GimKit allowed students to test-learn-repeat but use it in a setting that also tied into communal gaming. Within the game’s structure, they also taught each other how to play the game, working in teams or competing against each other. The scope of learning had been expanded to such measures, I couldn’t believe how well a small change in delivery made a drastic change in their learning attitudes towards quizzes.

Initially, I worried about judgement from students who might call out my attempts to ‘make things fun’ as thinly veiled pedantry, but honestly, the idea that they were learning the same material from grammar class in an unusual format gave the experience all the more weight.

I didn’t have to sell the value of the experience, they already knew it.

Improving tech literacy and tech-based soft skills,

During Co-Vid, we unanimously realized how poor the general tech literacy of our students were. Perhaps this is not reflective of the larger populous, I have not conducted studies on students outside our school, but based on our sample group, it was pretty obvious that most of our students didn’t even know how to switch from a Kana keyboard to an English keyboard.

Fast forward to 2023, students are now equipped with Chromebooks and are fairly familiar with using video calling methods, are familiar with using online LMS systems to receive and deliver content and now, understand the fundamentals of digital interactions well enough to use an all English UI without heavy reliance on instructions. They know how to employ translators to read specific passages or relay information when they are stuck.

I had to argue on that last point with one of my teachers about it. Using translators as a crutch versus learning to use it as a tool to communicate. Considering my goal is not to have students be native speakers, it matters little to me if they need help constructing cohesive sentences. After all, inputting something, reading the outcome, then assessing if the translation is true to your meaning is also a form of learning.

I put heavy limitations on how much and when students should use translators however, and I nefariously sow deep distrust of machine translations so my students know that double checking and due diligence is a must.

At the very least, poor performing students can still participate in class with a translator— which honestly, I’ll take, if the trade off for sullen incompetence and dejection from being unable to understand or having the skill to participate, is translator dependency.

..it is important for us to think about how gamification and learning can yield results in learning, rather than utilizing methods that result in ‘shining stars’ in classrooms; old and tired methodologies that reward personality and charisma rather than growth and motivation.

It’s difficult to break old fashioned mindsets about having fun not being a form of learning, but I have the great privilege of not having to depend on other teachers to execute my lessons.

My students also have the privilege of being technologically equipped enough for me to conduct these lessons. Above all, I have the trust of my teachers to be able to do this with free reign. Every EFL space is different but if there’s anything I can encourage EFL teachers who are looking to digitize game-based learning in their lessons, is that distilling game modes into their first principles will allow you to utilize tech that will fit into your teaching framework, instead of the other way around. No game mode can be applied lock, stock and barrel into language learning.

For EFL teachers who are looking to update their EFL teaching skills into alternative modes of learning, now more than ever, it is important for us to think about how gamification and learning can yield results in learning, rather than utilizing “gameplay” that result in ‘shining stars’ in classrooms; old and tired methodologies that reward personality and charisma rather than growth and motivation.

Although seemingly innocuous and innocent, shining stars and the concept of excellence above the rest is not well received in my experience. The neocolonialist approach to shining spotlights on an individual, to separate and reward is a subtle jab, a hint that one should rise above mediocrity; perpetuating a hero-culture that positions individual excellence over collective learning.


Instead, how might we consider EFL as a time for personal growth through exploration and play?


Sources:

* Development and Practice of Gamified Coursework Design Framework(Paper on Educational Practice Research) by Toru Fujimoto.
url: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjet/38/4/38_KJ00009873992/_article/-char/en