Social Situational Language Learning through an Online 3D Game

Learning a second language is challenging. Becoming fluent requires learning contextual information about how language should be used as well as word meanings and grammar. The majority of existing language learning applications provide only thin context around content. In this paper, we present work in Crystallize, a language learning game that combines traditional learning approaches with a situated learning paradigm by integrating a spaced-repetition system within a language learning roleplaying game. To facilitate long-term engagement with the game, we added a new quest paradigm, "jobs," that allow a small amount of design effort to generate a large set of highly-scaffolded tasks that grow iteratively. A large-scale evaluation of the language learning game "in the wild" with a diverse set of 186 people revealed that the game was not only engaging players for extended amounts of time but that players learned an average of 8.7 words in an average of 40.5 minutes.

学习第二语言具有挑战性。要做到流利，需要学习语言使用的语境信息以及单词的意思和语法。大多数现有的语言学习应用程序在内容周围提供的语境很单薄。在本文中，我们介绍了在《结晶》（Crystallize）中的相关工作，这是一款语言学习游戏，它通过在一个语言学习角色扮演游戏中整合一个间隔重复系统，将传统学习方法与情境学习范式相结合。为了促进玩家对游戏的长期参与，我们增加了一种新的任务范式——“工作”，只需少量设计工作就能生成大量高度结构化且迭代增长的任务。对186名不同人群进行的关于这款语言学习游戏的大规模“实地”评估显示，该游戏不仅能长时间吸引玩家，而且玩家平均在40.5分钟内学习了8.7个单词。