 Well thank you all for turning out. It's Friday afternoon. We have the room until five o'clock, but you don't have to speak Julie until five o'clock. Just let you know. Okay. So Julie Sykes, let me introduce you quickly to Julie and then she's going to take it away and show you all the great stuff that they're doing at the University of Oregon at Castles. Julie Sykes earned her PhD from the University of Minnesota with a focus on applied linguistics and second language acquisition. Her research focuses on the use of digital technologies for language acquisition with a specific focus on inter-language pragmatic development and intercultural competence. She's taught courses on second language teaching and learning methodology and research, language learning and technology, Hispanic linguistics, and inter-language pragmatic development. Julie's experience includes the design, implementation, and evaluation of online immersive spaces and the creation of place-based augmented reality mobile games to engage learners in a variety of non-institutional context and you're going to be talking about some of those today, right? She's published various articles on computer assisted language learning related topics including synchronous computer mediated communication and pragmatic development, gaming and computer assisted language learning, and lexical acquisition in digitally mediated environments. She serves as the University of Oregon scholar in residence and also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Linguistics. Julie Sykes, give her a big hand. Thank you, Carl, for that nice introduction. I'm going to talk about lots of these things kind of all mixed together and remixed together. It's a very long title. Maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally, just sort of how this interdisciplinary work goes. Before I begin though, anyone who tells you we do this kind of work alone is wrong. I think academia, we always think of as being this sort of isolated solitary space. That's not actually the case, especially when we start talking about digital technologies and games and these big projects that we're working on. So a special thank you to Carl and his team and to Natalie and Sarah and Betsy for bringing me here and to Dale. I've known Dale since I was first starting as an MA student and she's like, keep going. Keep going. It's going to be great. And she still talked to me after I didn't come to UT for grad school, which I really appreciated. So thank you for that as well. Also, my team at home, the Castles team. We have 12 of us who work where Sister LRC to Coral here at Texas and three of my closest collaborators on many of the games we're going to talk about today. Chris Holden at the University of New Mexico, Peter Moore, who built my very first ever 3D game. He's at the University of Minnesota and Steve Thorne. And so just an acknowledgement that this work is a collective body of the kind of work we're doing and hopefully that all of us keep doing. It's part of the open education space, right, is learning to collaborate, not only on the kinds of things we do, but the thinking that we do as well. I'm not going to talk two hours. I promise you that the goal is maybe an hour and then lots of time for discussion, questions, interaction as we need it. The talk really has three goals and three parts as we go through. The first is to explore discourse and language as used by the community, in which we live. A big part of that is the digital world, which is where I'm going to focus. And so I want us to just get a sense of why all of this is so important and why it's so complicated. Digital isn't the only place these things are happening, but they're really nice, salient, clear place to think about them. We can see them happening in real time, which is really fun. We're also going to consider an operationalized approach to L2 pragmatic development that is hopefully more reflective of this comprehensive set of skills learners need moving beyond the idea that pragmatics is a set of strategies or functions we put in different orders and make them work. It's something bigger and more complicated or comprehensive than that. And then we're going to talk about utilizing technological innovation to make this systemic, right? If we actually could scale innovation in the ways that we're doing, what would that look like? And how can we do that? Digital tools being sort of the primary space that allows us to do things on the back end we can't do in face to face environments. And if we think of those digital tools in that way, we can sort of expand and increase the opportunities to do that kind of work. So I'm good. Everyone on board. That's kind of the journey we're going to take today. Anyway. So starting with the idea about digital language and digital discourse, the numbers here aren't necessarily important. Other than looking at the increased and prolific use of internet users, social media users, unique mobile users. In other words, the number of mobile of accounts right is increasing active mobile social users. 30% right? Critical to thinking about this, we think of it as oh, I just wish people would get off their phones and talk to people. What is happening here? What's actually happening is people are talking to people and they're so grossly engaged with talking to people they're unable to look up. So we have to think about how those behave. Good, bad. I'm not saying either one is good or bad. But it's inaccurate to express the idea that they're not talking to people. They're not interacting face to face with people. They are engaging with often people in different ways in those spaces. And it's part of understanding language and the things that we need to do. The other thing I want to show you is active users of these global social platforms. Facebook has been at the top. I bet that's gone down, actually, in the last three weeks. The point being, these are high stakes environments worth billions and billions of dollars. The behaviors that are happening in Twitter since the presidential election have skyrocketed the stocks of that company for a reason, right? All of a sudden, people are paying attention, good or bad. Again, I want to be cautious not to place value over positively on the technological space or undervalue it. That's the trick. It's a neutral space that we have to try to figure out and try to dig into. And we'll get to language learning here in a minute, I promise. Thorne Swarrow and Smith really accurately point out, I think, that the internet has qualitatively transformed everyday communication and actually constitutes a multiplicity of language context zones really unprecedented in human history. On top of that, I would add, we have access to them. Unlike language context zones where we fly to borders and we look at what's happening and we collect field data, we can look at tons and tons of data really, really quickly. Just to make this point, and I hope I've pulled some examples you're familiar with and some many of you are probably like, what the heck is she talking about? That's exactly the point here. One is thinking of Facebooking, right? How many of you have used Facebooking as a verb, right? 10 years ago, that didn't even exist as a word, right? Now it is inherent part of digital and non-digital discourse. Facebook doesn't just happen in Facebook. Facebook happens everywhere. Even if you're saying I'm no longer going to use Facebook, right? Hashtags, I would argue we're not quite done with the analysis, but I would argue hashtags are the number one marker of pragmatic behavior and electronic discourse that we've seen. It's the way we mark socio-pragmatics. It's the way we mark context in different backgrounds. It's the way people categorize themselves with other groups of people. Some pretty salient hashtags we've seen recently with really high stakes consequences, things like delete Facebook, the Me Too movement, right? This is just two examples of all these things that are happening, but then also we have really neutral hashtags that mark context that do different things, right? The change and sort of give us more insight into the actual text or the actual image that's happening. Finally, thinking about the emoji movie. Has anyone seen the emoji movie? I have two small kids, so I've seen it for a reason. Not because I was dying to watch the emoji movie. Anyone know what it's about? You've seen it? What's it about? Yeah, my kid, right? So essentially it's about this meh guy, right? He's a meh emoji and emojis are only supposed to have one expression and meh has tons of expressions and he can change his expressions all the time. So he's viewed as a malfunction. And the entire movie is about living in the world of this phone, of this one particular human being and the entire ecosystem of that telephone, the cloud, all the apps they go through, how it gets deleted and they have essentially personified technological innovation of the last 10 years. If you are not familiar with these things, it makes absolutely no sense. None whatsoever, right? It's a context that is worth talking about in that people are so familiar more specifically four to 12 year olds are familiar enough with these kind of spaces that it's becoming ubiquitous as part of their life. Finally, to make the point that humans change technology, yes, technology of course changes humans, right? Absolutely. The other reality is we make lots of choices to ensure that the discursive behaviors we like in our context exist. Dot, dot, dot. It's my favorite one. My favorite innovation in technology. Why? Anyone know? Someone who studies pragmatics and cares a lot about how people interact? Why do I like it? What does dot, dot, dot mean? Does anyone know what I'm talking about when you're texting, right? Somebody's writing, there's someone on the other end. Do I interrupt their turn? Do I not interrupt their turn? It was added because people like turn taking mechanisms. We can show turn taking patterns in all kinds of discursive situations, including digital environments of which learners have to understand. Just to give you a little bit of comic relief, we'll see how this goes. I'm not going to show you the whole thing. There's a little bit of profanity and I don't need to cause that on the video anyway. But I do want to show you this because I think it's a really interesting commentary on where we are. The point being, right? Fundamentally changing social behavior, right? Ten years ago, five years ago, no one would have been too concerned, right? Now it's like, wow, what's going on? Maybe we still aren't. I don't know. But the point is, it's for some, it's actually a fundamental shift in the kinds of things that are happening. Are we good? All right. Not all of it's good. This is one of my favorite articles out of the New York Times. If you haven't read it, everyone know what Alexa is. The stand-up speaker, sort of real-time AI goes into everyone's homes and does really cool things for you. Co-parenting with Alexa. What does that look like? I can attest to it. Alexa has a personality in our house. She's not going to exist for a long. See, she even has a name and a gender. My kids require you to be polite with Alexa. So if you come into the house, my dad was there and he's like, Alexa, turn on the music and Lily goes, you need to say please, dad. Right? All these kinds of things. This article goes on to talk about what does this mean for the personification of machines and technology. Again, not necessarily good. Not necessarily bad. We don't actually know. I mean we see lots of research on digital distraction. We see lots of research on our inability to calm down and on focus. That's really important. We have to pay attention to that too. Therefore, when thinking about language and this multiplicity of complications around how human interaction happens, pragmatics comes right back to the core. Right? Pragmatics being the way we communicate meaning with each other. It means it doesn't actually matter what your structure looks like if you're unable to sort of manipulate it by context. It means we have to shape and adapt and move and do all kinds of things on the fly. Also not something we see in typical language curricula. Let's take for example this. Sorry, one second. All right. Let's take the utterance. Let's grab a cup of coffee sometime. Let's grab a cup of coffee sometime. I am at a new reception we've just met for the first time. We're chatting and I say hey let's grab a cup of coffee. How many of you think I have full intention of going to coffee with you within the next two weeks? How many of you are like oh yeah she's just saying getting out of the conversation maybe? Right? I mean that's what it is. Mostly most often used as a pre-closer. Right? In situations of meeting someone new it's a pre-closer that we use to end the conversation. Great. Grammar's fine. Actually kind of colloquial in the right context. The meaning causes all kinds of miscommunication. Learners of English come to the United States. They get all these invitations that aren't actually invitations so they think American students are shallow and offer all these sort of unintended things. American students are like why are they so clingy? Why are they following me everywhere? What's going on Julie? The reality is it's just a mismatch in how that invitation occurred. Even more so things as simple as words right? Coffee. In this case coffee might mean a coke, it might mean a water, it might mean a tea, it might mean all kinds of things. But in every single language textbook what do we see? Coffee. A picture that looks like that. Right? So we have to think of language more differently. Even more so when we get to social media. This is a really old one. There are lots of new ones. You can Google it. Social media explained. You'll see all this is the original and I like the original the best. So you can look at the newest versions. Some of these don't even exist anymore. The idea being they demonstrate the fundamentally distinct idea of digital context. Pragmatics is at the heart of what is going on here. Right? Twitter I'm eating a donut. Hashtag donut. Right? I like donuts. This is where I eat donuts. There's all kinds of information encoded in this language. It is not enough to say hey use social media. What social media? What kind of social media? What's going on? What do you mean? Blog put what? So the point is we can never actually teach learners all of those things. I could never say do this on Facebook. Do this on Twitter. Do this on Snapchat which I don't use and don't understand. Do this on Twitter which I actually try to avoid. Do this on all right it's an impossible feat for a language teacher to teach everything. Now on top of that it's impossible to teach you everything that has nothing to do with digital discourse as well. Language variety, individual choices, personalities, preferences. So our goal has to be to get at skills dispositions and behaviors that enable learners to do this kind of work with language themselves. Right? They have to get the skills that they need to deal with meaning. Right? Fundamental canonical definition of pragmatics. The way meaning is understood and the way meaning is communicated between a group of speakers. Right? Intended, assumptions, force, what happens with all of these pieces and we do that kind of in two ways. Talking about functions, understanding is an invitation or is it a pre-closing? Understanding how you might accomplish certain things with language but also a set of skills and strategies around that. From another perspective Leo Van Leer calls this the ecological or systemic approach. Right? Extending sort of our understanding of pragmatics to include things about context, about emergent patterns that are always changing the need to adapt consistently to changing conditions which happens all the time. The variability that is no longer a nuisance but actually a sign of vitality in a culture. I mean I think that's one of the things about Leo's work that was so interesting is it said pay attention. When something is living and alive it's always changing and if we don't teach our language students to do that we're doing them a certain disservice as multi-lingual participants in that society. That being said we have a little bit of a problem and it's a problem that we've been working on for a long time. Right? I wish I could say I got to do, Dale's been doing it much longer than I have Carl. Right? This kind of work about how do we do this informal instructional context. How do we actually say I care more about your ability to interact in the world than I care about your ability to use a preposition correctly? Because although I do care about your accuracy eventually because it's the only way to do meaning I need you to pay attention first. Why is it so difficult? Right? And happy to share any of these references. This is a very subset of this immense language variety, personality, individual perceptions just about the world. Right? Some people prefer a flatter affect than other people. Many people are like Julie calm down. Right? That is a preference about how we engage in things we're excited about or things we're not excited about. It's always dynamic and co-constructed. There are lots of moments when you stop and you say I'm really sorry I didn't really mean it like that. I can tell it upset you. Can we start over? Rewind. Right? But if we're always chalking it up to oh I might have not gotten the right word. Right? That's a different thing when we talk about language learners and we talk about multilingualism in particular. In order to tackle these problems we've looked at a number of different things. One is a model around how we do this and that is observing, analyzing, and extending. The goal being first you get learners to just pay attention. I want you to look at how this invitation sequence works. Do you notice that in Spanish they insist at least three times? Almost across the board most varieties I'm going to say most I'll never say every. Most varieties of Spanish insist at least more than once but in most cases it's three times. Hey you want to come to this thing? No I really can't. No you really have to come. No I can't. No no really without you it's not going to be the same. And as you refuse each time what do you have to do? Anyone know? It's your quiz your pragmatics quiz of the day. What? More evidence that you can't go. More evidence that you can't go or you soften your refusal. First it's like no no no I have to work I'm really really sorry I'd love to but no no no you have to be there. Well maybe I could try but really this project is really important and lots of times not always. Most often by the end it's like okay okay I'll try really hard. The I'll try really hard means what? No! Right? You're not going but what happens to a learner an English speaker who's a learner of Spanish what happens? All of a sudden they're like they're coming they said they'd really try and no one shows up. What? Right? The meaning and the intention matter. Right? Perfect structures without that understanding of meaning doesn't do that. So getting learners to pay attention to those kinds of behaviors. My students always say I hate it and I'm like what? They're like once you see it you can't stop seeing it and it is true right once you start thinking about language in that way it becomes almost impossible to be like oh they might not actually be mad maybe we just didn't do that right? Right? Like maybe we had different ideas about what happened in this space. Oh now I have to actually think about it. Right? It doesn't mean we don't get to be mad it means we get to decide when and how and we can use language the most effectively in those places. Then we have them analyze and then extend that to the world in which they live right? Analysis means I want you to pull this apart it can go directly side by side with the kinds of activities we do in language classrooms anyway. Right? We can fill in greeting sequences and we can take two extra minutes to put those greeting sequences on a continuum of who you'd use them with. We can talk about past let's see we can talk about obligations in the future and instead of just looking at the utterances and the structure for creating those obligations we can match an obligation with its appropriate context. I'd really like to but right it's a mitigator most often it counts as a mitigator and so doing these kinds of intentional tiny little tweaks gets us started right? Those are the kinds of things we think about in those models. So what we've done is we've actually intentionally said okay we know about this model we know these are the things that are tricky we also know that digital games specifically and also other digital technologies enable us to overcome those really really difficult barriers to pragmatic instruction. For example if we think about individual personality choices one of these many difficulties I can actually give an individual experience to a user in a game that's systematic. So as a player I go in as me or my avatar or my character I encounter that digital world we're talking about this one here croquet line this is an old school one. We can actually encounter this digital world as ourselves based on our personalities looking at what we're interested in while also systematically building in the kinds of pragmatic behavior we want in this case it was requests and apologies you got to mess around instead of me saying I need you to request like this and apologize like this in Spanish it says try it out here's what we know more generally here's what we know more generally and here's what you can do if you want to mess around you break a glass with a vendor in the market you can choose how to repair that if you do it well the vendor get is happy if you do it poorly the vendor is mad but it's not me as a teacher saying do this do that do that um that's just one small example happy to talk more about that not necessarily the focus here we do it with mobile games so mentira and ecopod are two games built on mobile devices that actually engage you out into the neighborhood with mentira you go out you're part of one of four families you have clues you have to uncover in order to solve a murder mystery the better you are at pragmatics the better clues you get so each family has a very clearly stereotypically salient pragmatics set of behaviors one requires deference and mitigation one requires directness you have to figure out which is which to get the right clues you do really well you have the right clues you do really poorly your person in your family is probably going to jail in the trial because you didn't get enough evidence we actually asked them to walk around the neighborhood where this occurred historical fiction overlaid on actual Spanish speaking neighborhoods in albu curcini mexico you have to use your digital device that you're using anyway to look up right i want to facilitate your experience in the seemingly neutral maybe on interesting neighborhoods you some of them have been there a hundred times and not even known this neighborhood really matters right ecopod is about cultural narrative and sort of socio-pragmatics again not the focus here and happy to return to any of these projects as we get going we'll talk a little bit about it the two i really want to dig into our games to teach because Carl wanted me to talk about games as well as lingra to go two of our one sort of an ongoing project and one as an extended project of what we're doing right now to get these kinds of information into classrooms across the country it's one thing for my Spanish students and dale's Spanish students to do pragmatics it's a whole other thing when you're training hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of teachers to do this kind of work that doesn't actually exist in textbooks anywhere right we don't have one yet that has really clear pragmatic information but before we sort of dig into the tech a little bit i wanted to give you a little preview of what we're looking at we have to understand the what if we don't start to operationalize what pragmatics is it becomes everything right it becomes overwhelming it becomes the space where all of a sudden we're like yeah maybe we should just kind of let learners do this on their own i'm pretty good at this other stuff that we're good at so what we did is actually with my team we pulled apart 58 key publications in intercultural communicative competence and l2 pragmatics and we said found 15 different instruments 35 distinct coding schema they're all primarily theoretical in nature and it is so heterogeneous it becomes impossible to figure out what we're talking about all essentially purporting to talk about the exact same construct right so what we did is we said let's pull it all apart and let's look at what's in common across all of these models if we look at what we all could sort of narrow down to the essence of this kind of skill and behavior what does that look like this is what we came up with four dimensions of l2 or interactional pragmatic competence two on the analytical side and two on the affective side so not and I'll look at these more closely in a minute knowledge being what we're used to right the kinds of things that you need to actually perform specific functions the strategies analysis then being your ability to figure out why those are used and what's different about them then on the other side on the more affective side is looking at subjectivity a learner's choice how do we know when a learner chooses to deviate from norms or when they just don't know that's a really big difference right sometimes we actually choose not to adopt the norm of a culture we're learning about of a language we're learning and maybe contrary and maybe this is kind of controversial we shouldn't have to right this idea that learners are becoming like natives actually is the wrong construct you're never going to be like them right Claire Kromsch talks about this all the time you instead are figuring out how you fit in a productive meaningful multi-lingual globalized space and that's our goal to figure that out but I want to know I don't want my students to fake it right I don't want them to be like oh I'm just choosing not to do that really right what are we going to do with that and then finally just awareness that this matters in the world right three basic assumptions that we pulled from these and they're really really important because they definitely move this model into a space that might be a little bit different from what people are used to in terms of ICC one all interaction is co-constructed our assumption is that absolutely you engage and decide on norms based on who you're talking to period there might be patterns there might not right and so we need to be okay with that also any kind of profile like this is irreducible to a single score right it's irreducible to say hey I'm going to give you a pragmatic competence score like we do with an API or with a proficiency level there has to be some sort of profile associated with this and likely many profiles equal productive language users and language interactants and finally we're talking about skills not attitudes many of the frameworks we look at talk about preferences talk about kinds of foods you're willing to eat talk about places you're willing to sleep from our perspective and from our analysis that actually doesn't have anything to do with your ability to communicate well with humans if I only want to eat macaroni and she's the rest of my life my four-year-old at least that's what she does I at least need to say I really would prefer only to eat this or you don't have to be this sort of adventurous opened everything kind of person that has benefits in other ways of course but it doesn't actually tell us much about your ability to interact well with human beings just to give you a sense of what this framework looks like on the knowledge side we have four areas right one recognizes and produces varying speech styles identifies and produces routine formula in multiple domains in other words I can invite someone with a friend in a service encounter I don't know why you'd invite and in a professional space etc interprets and produces implicature in multiple domains implicature being one of the fundamental pieces of pragmatics and intercultural that is really tricky and then demonstrates knowledge of varying cultural dimensions and social distinctions so you actually can start thinking about oh with the leave taking I need to start this much earlier than I was anticipating as you go through the analysis piece uses conscious strategies to repair miscommunication right you actually can stop and say oh something went weird there right something didn't happen like I intended identifies and evaluates intended in our locator meaning and can figure out why and describes dimensions impacting discourse patterns things like turn taking you can actually give a meta analysis or what we might call metapragmatic skills would fall into this piece of that subjectivity looks at demonstrating the ability to make conscious choices about discursive patterns and behaviors and can discern individual personality from cultural norms right you have to know if the person you're interacting with is sort of an odd duck right or if it's like oh this is something I'm going to have to really get used to as I work through this culture finally on the awareness scale demonstrates awareness of others perspectives this is more general so analysis really focuses in on the language piece of those pragmatic pieces the discursive piece maybe even gestures awareness opens that up to a bigger space and then recognizes motives and reasons for actions of one selves often that thinks about that means we're talking about cultural background history why there's this long standing assumption about certain things from long long ago right there is a historical space that you have to pay attention to so that is the perspective we're taking in much of this work as we sort of dive into the games and the tech and what do we do again as you can see it's sort of this complex picture that when all together you're like oh yeah cool trying to isolate all of those pieces is what's really difficult and that's what we're trying to figure out how to do and that's what we call addressing the how right that's what we're going to sort of dig into great so how do we do any of this one is taking advantage of the affordances of digital technologies these can be validated they can be scaled and we can get lots and lots and lots of data we can actually try to figure out what's happening both pre and post but also during for example in some of the croquetlandia research I did originally we had 120 hours of gameplay data press pre post plus 65 hours of interview data we had all these learners we're doing okay right and all of a sudden I'm like what's going on with this group of learners they did pretty well in their products pre post shows change what's really going on because they don't quite seem to get the stuff we're talking about I went in they never had touched the game they learned from their friends they had accounts of the game they knew all this stuff about the game all this attendant discourse work but the data actually could tell us like oh of course they never actually did this piece and so we have to think through the process when we're looking at innovation and we're trying to figure out building interventions for lots and lots of people again as I mentioned the first place we went and the place I was most interested in is digital games mostly because of their ability to do complicated things in pretty simple ways the games themselves to build are really difficult the ideas about what we put in them are really challenging but in the end we actually see a pretty straightforward you know when you play a good game how many of you have actually liked to play games maybe I should say kind of complicated games how many of you are like no way that's allowed too right what we know about games and learning is that they're very good at goal orientation and goal directed activity without taking away player agency the goals of the game are really clear my learning objectives are really really clear right I want you to do this whatever that looks like in my case that's I want you to learn pragmatics in some cases that's I want you to conquer the world in other cases it's I want you to rescue the princess but you get to decide how you get there also we see a strong social consequence of that whether that's in the game which actually is pretty low stakes more it's around the game right people who play that game as well also really care about what happens and a willingness to communicate Rangers and Watana have some really interesting work on using games and getting learners willing to speak up right in ways that they don't do into vocal classrooms also a strong potential for language socialization or in other words learning something new as you go through a community it simulates really well what it's like to not know anything in this really complicated world all the way through like yeah I'm an expert I can do this if you liken it to an airport the first time you ever get off in a target target language country and you've never been there before and you're like I got this I at least can get my suitcase and you look and it's what right but you know this sign matters and so you can filter there and you know that and games do that really well they start you by focusing you and then get you to the bigger picture finally complex feedback mechanisms they're the only system you're not the only they're one of the few systems where we get individualized real-time feedback in other words when you get killed like it or not in a game it doesn't matter it's the principle we care about you get immediate feedback about what you did wrong and you get to try again and you can do that 25 times if you need to before you get it right we also scaffold it really well in games if we do the classic version does that Super Mario Brothers if I say that does everyone have some familiarity it's a little man right Luigi and they jump around you start by jumping like this right then what happens you have to do a double jump then what happens oh we have to do a super jump super hard right B to A has to go and then what happens the cliff opens up underneath all of a sudden if you miss your super jump you fall in versus before you just jumped over and so it scaffold you into these kinds of behaviors that you get to practice over and over and over again which is what we want with language right we want them to start sentence level word level and get to this discursive level intentionally without it feeling like they mess up all the time right that's what happens to learners they make one mistake and it's like I'm not talking again in this class right like I'm done games do the exact opposite thing oh I messed up oh I gotta get this hold on mom I just gotta beat this level it's my very favorite expression and the worst thing to hear right because you're like please really could you stop playing this game I get that that's not what we're talking about we're talking about the behavior that says hold on I'm learning let me practice again right those are the things that we actually really care about so what we did then is we pulled it apart and we said okay great for pragmatics we get agency we get the ability to deal with language variety I can actually put a bunch of non-player characters in a game that have all kinds of varieties of Spanish and you gotta figure it out right whoa that person oh that person's different than that person why are they so different what's going on and then as an instructor I get to build in all kinds of wraparound analysis and reflection it's like why are they different let's dissect it let's look at it let's figure it out again feedback we just talked about in addition context right games have the ability to emotionally connect a user to the experience not to the technology to the experience right they did some early research with the Stanley Milgram experiments of the 60s does everyone know what I'm talking about there so it used to be it was an actual human you sat in front of the screen and they would pay you to shock them and the more you shocked them the more pain and they were looking at people's thresholds and they would major all kinds of neurological and brain things what they did they wanted to know how people relate to avatars and digital environments so they actually replicated that exact study and guess what they found the same if not worse right the stress effect of stressing that avatar probably having to do a temporal space and how we feel about shocking people in the 60s versus the 2000s right but what that told us it's just one study there's others tons looking at avatar embodiment and identity integration what it said is we might actually be able to create a role play that means something right what happens now when we give role plays here's some cards you all have a scenario what happens I don't have an idea yeah they have to visualize the context but I happens to get the doctor card and I never have any interest in being the doctor right what happens I'll be the doctor blah blah blah what's wrong with blah blah right and you see you can watch it happen you can watch the eyes glaze over you can watch or you can watch when a learner gets a role they're excited about and you're like yes I'm gonna be oh right and you see these things happening and so the goal is actually to create role plays that means something right to connect that emotional space to what's going on finally again language variation and variety being a fundamental goal of the kinds of things we do I talked a little bit about mentira the family murder mystery game eco pot is a separate kind of game in which we start to get at the awareness and metapragmatic side of things so mentira really looks at knowledge and analysis in Spanish for fourth semester students of Spanish you have to know the routine formula and you have to analyze how they work across language varieties eco pot is all about the other side of that scale the awareness side where you say I want you to pay attention to how it might be different you have to survive a pandemic it's based on the first year reading that every student read at the University of Oregon so they've already read the novel we use that novel we turn it into choose your own adventure game to see if you could live through the first 40 days of the pandemic which is what happens in the book and so they start by trying to survive in Oregon and then they play in their target language one of five languages Japanese Chinese French German or Spanish and all of a sudden what you see happening is it feels weird right because we gave them all the same choices we gave them all the same narrative that we did in the English version but what's the problem with that the language is great what's the problem all the pragmatics all the cultural pieces are completely off right and there are some countries in which you would get the choice in this case that you have to leave your room get out right get your stuff get going you're going to be in trouble some countries you don't have that choice in other places you wouldn't even get a warning and so what we asked learners to do then and wrap around with their instructors with their groups was we want you to actually figure out how to rewrite this narrative to make it pragmatically appropriate so actually using game design as the learning tool playing was part of it but they didn't play to learn they actually had to rethink how to design as part of a narrative essentially so what we do is we try to be true to the game characters colloquial language instead of the games colloquial language so in other words in all of our games Ventura is especially because we had New Mexican Spanish and we intentionally put New Mexican Spanish in there we had some speakers who tried to avoid that because we wanted with the heritage language identity pieces is we're very true to a character and their persona but we say in this imaginary game world they all live together all the time right so that's what's fun about games is we can sort of mess it up we can mess with it but we also then make sure we account for all of those right as many of them as we can we don't get all of them of course it has I mean from my perspective it has to be that way right games give us the opportunity to do that not doing so is sort of a disservice in a way that we can't do in a printed text sometimes right there wouldn't be space to put all 200 greeting possibilities right think that's where we're at right in Spain I don't know it's something like that there are quite a few right of what you can do just to give you a sense of the data this is the kind of thing we do this is from Ventura we plot out how users do it how they work with it we find there's a ton of value here's what the research shows us so far one place is key to the creation of meaningful fictional stories we need the place so they're going out into that neighborhood really matters mobile technologies can facilitate complex interactions in the community one of my favorite stories anyone familiar with Albuquerque understands what I mean when I say cholo right so you have it's a very clear persona it's a very clear not to be stereotypical but rather a piece that they themselves self identify with right you have to have the right truck and the right painting and the right tires and the right music I mean everything about this identity matters and sometimes it's scary to learners good bad indifferent there was a house where his grandmother was living our students are out playing he pulls up his truck and they're like not quite sure they stopped and they're like hey check out our game right and they engage him with this game next thing I know 45 minutes later they're all checking out the truck the game has gone who knows what happened to it right and it became a real community interaction in that place and that in and of itself showed up in their data over and over and over again now I see Spanish matters he loved it when I knew these words right those kinds of things in a way that they wouldn't get otherwise there's Joe the sausage guy he lives on the neighborhood he has a food cart he does sells green chili sausage if you ever go to Los Curiegos and Albuquerque get a sausage from Joe it's delicious but he also facilitates oh let me tell you about the history of Spanish in this neighborhood let me tell you about what my mom did I don't speak Spanish anymore but let me tell you what it's like right it changes fundamentally the kinds of interactions we care about is it true if I tested them on Predator versus Imperfect after that experience they do worse yeah it's true eventually though they'd be able to tell us that story really really well using the structures they need in a way that matters to them and that's what really matters in the kind of work they were looking we'd get there it's not that it's gone forever it's that we're requiring a bigger picture earlier so some things that we've been working on also as I mentioned one is we build games right I'm under no illusion everyone in this room even wants to build a game or can or should it doesn't the idea this takes teams of people and I would say I'm not the game designer right I'm the language person so we always have teams of game designers that come in and work with us this is one of my very favorites that you can start right away this is on games to teach it's a freely available resources part of our LRC grant this is the kind of work that we do it's called parable of the polygons has anyone ever played this nicky cases by far one of my favorite game designers he's out of portland this is essentially a story game blog it's an interactive website where you learn about race you think about race and you have to keep your squares and your triangles happy that's your goal and the way that you're happy is when you're by people who are the same as you and different than you but there are certain proportions of how many sameness and how many different and their squares and triangles right totally neutralized in that space but as you go through the game starts to teach you about oh look what happened everyone ended up segregated anyway in their own groups why does that happen why are humans like that and it gives you a neutral space to engage with these kinds of issues and language courses and so we've built out a full set of activities that a teacher could do tomorrow you can download them they're freely available at the novice intermediate and advanced levels based on national standards for proficiency throwing in as much pragmatics as we can because pragmatics are fairly void from those standards we also have a number of similar activities around commercial games so instead of building our own games let's use what's already out there let's use what people are putting millions of dollars into and let's do something with it around these language issues let's get learners engaged these are just three examples SimCity build it it's a simulation game around building your own city we have all kinds of activities about sitting planning about cultural differences economics and as you get into more advanced levels obviously the topics get more advanced right novice level we're looking at words and structures and textures by the end you're having to look at in this case Plague Inc. you're having to look at making decisions about where world aid goes how are those decisions made and what role does language have in those decisions you can see the languages these are available for so the idea is you play the language in your target language there are activity packs they look kind of like this directly associated with those this is just the summary so you can get an idea right at the novice level you have to recognize and understand basic vocabulary in order to play the game you have to understand and follow basic instructions you have to list relevant places around town and describe the locations we do that all the time right and so it gives us a way to get at some of these issues from the beginning in addition to building kind of our own games the newest project that we have is called Lingro to Go I'm really really excited about this it's a freely available app it's a partnership with Lingro Learning you can download the app now on your iPhones it's easy to do or on your Android devices if you ever run out of coins just shoot me an email I'll send you a bunch of new free coins it's not about the money piece but what we've done is we've actually taken a stand and we've said functional language learning matters if we start with function at the premise and at the beginning instead of a structure that we've had for a long long time which says here's grammar let's fit these structures on top right in Spanish an example we have a lot of is the reflexive verbs everyone can tell me where reflexive verbs are in every Spanish text where anyone who teaches Spanish you know it's probably the same in French I guess anyone know daily routines yeah hey Carl what'd you do this morning oh Julia let me tell you I got up and first I brushed my teeth and then I got in the shower and then I brushed my what right we never tell people that part about our day unless we're figuring out a schedule for who's going to get up first and shower first and we have all this stuff going on or oh my gosh it was this crazy day you're never going to believe what happened I was brushing my hair and the brush fell apart and then my hair dryer stopped working right there are very specific reasons but that is not where we inherently use reflexive verbs what we've done historically traditionally as we've said we need a communicative function we know communicative language teaching is important in this country we're going to put this function on top of this grammar point and make it look communicative right the opposite is actually where we started so what we did is we said what functions do learners at the novice level need what functions at the intermediate do learners need and how do we get there and how do we pull apart structure to get at that so what you see here is just a sample from the scope and sequence but it takes you through saying hello to your friends and family what you really need is greetings and nice to meet you right there's a lexical set there's a structural set you see the lexicon first then you see the structure you need greeting chunks and question punctuation and word order it's not void of structure it's the opposite it's saying I want to give you the grammar and the structure you need to be able to make a meaningful connection with the function you're accomplishing then you we have two other videos about greeting friends and family which I'm going to show you in a minute and then writing down words to remember them language learning strategies explicit strategic information on how to learn right I want you to pay attention ultimately is what we're saying to give you a sense of how that pragmatic information gets embedded there are two pieces no matter which social media platform you're using you have to admit that hashtags are hashtag awesome or genial after all they can add so much extra meaning to what you're saying one way they add meaning is by providing some additional context are you at the hashtag san sebastian film festival or is something new happening right now etiqueta ahora no matter what it is you can tell people who what's where and when with a hashtag simply by adding a word or two hashtags also add meaning by facilitating connections for example a brand of food can connect itself with a movie by using a hashtag with its title individuals can connect themselves with celebrities by using their names with a hashtag either way a sort of digital relationship is created another way that hashtags make meaning is by summarizing complex situations a great example that arose out of the Bolivian water crisis was etiqueta la paz sin agua another great example no matter what your purpose make sure to use a hashtag on your next social media post you just might add a little extra meaning to your message so in that case we chose to actually explicitly teach them those pieces hopefully the greeting one is next I thought they're out of order so now what do I say one of the first phrases many people learn in Spanish is cómo estás along with qué tal it's just one of the many ways to say how are you but before we look at the way people commonly respond to these expressions in Spanish let's take a minute to think about what you would say in English would you instinctively say something like great fine or okay in English we often use the phrase how are you as a way to simply greet others there is typically no expectation of a detailed response or any information about how you really feel in fact it's often jarring when someone gives a serious or genuine answer in Spanish however cómo estás or qué tal can be answered with both short and long responses the question is more often than not a genuine inquiry into someone's well-being and it's quite common for Spanish speakers to respond with additional information that explains their response offering more details is a way to build solidarity or closeness in a relationship and express interest in continuing the conversation so next time someone asks you cómo estás don't be afraid to tell them how you really feel and get the conversation rolling and always expect the same when you ask so if we go back to our original model right knowledge you gotta know qué tal cómo estás right you also then need to analyze which one do I do when and who do I give explanations to do I not give explanations to right I might choose to never give more explanations that might be a choice right I that's not me I can't do that or you might know like oh I actually get to tell people this is my day right awareness is knowing that this difference even occurs right we can start this week one of a Spanish class it doesn't have to be something that waits till study abroad it doesn't have to be something that people do eventually when they get good enough right the other thing I really like about when we start digging into discourse is we can actually use this then for other pieces right writing assessment first two weeks of class hey fill out my comic about how people greeted each other and all of a sudden you have right the explanation that has to occur in a very real way in the app learners not only watch the video but then they get to play games that actually reinforce those issues the strategy they get to they have to make decisions they get to play trivia they get to sort words we also look at lexicon instruction all these pieces to be able to really dive into the way lexicon structure pragmatic strategies all work together to accomplish the kinds of things we do with language every day again freely available scalable the whole idea is how do we get this out into the world in ways that people can do something with it the last piece I'm going to talk about and then I promise to wrap up is ipik this is one of the projects that we're maybe most excited about and most challenged by so if in a year from now this hasn't happened you can hold me accountable for saying oh keep trying but we don't know exactly how it's going to come out to be totally honest ipik is a partnership with another language resource center AELRC out of Georgetown University in the Center for Applied Linguistics and the goal of this project really is to develop a digital simulation for assessing this framework in other words can we put an ipik score next to an OPI score and give you a more accurate picture of how well a learner will do right you might only be advanced mid proficiency level but you might have a really high ipik score right that might make you better abroad than a superior level learner with a really low ipik score I mean yes it will make you better hopefully if we can get the test right I mean that's the trick right so we are starting with Korean and Spanish and it will have an English test version as well to one provide instructors with the profile of their students in our cultural competence or pragmatic competence and enable them to have then appropriate instructional interventions the way we are doing this is through digital games and simulations so you go in you have a series of people you have to interact with those pieces about feedback and agency the goal is you need to accomplish these tasks we then pause the assessment and we say hey why did you do that getting at subjectivity getting at reflection we are looking at it across three domains so looking at peer to peer interaction service encounters and professional encounters for five language functions greetings leave takings requests refusals and invitations all of which in some way can be engaged across those three domains and down different sort of levels of intensity power distance etc so I don't have anything to show you yet because we just finished the models and the storyboards but I wanted to let you know that's sort of where we're going if we start from these sort of commercial game wrap around spaces mobile stuff AR in the middle all the way through to eventually we want to be able to test this which is what's going to make it matter long-term sort of in the world at large from there hopefully the idea is where what how and what do we do with all of this to make it a reality in language classrooms with that I will leave it open for questions and discussions I promised Karl less than an hour so there you go 53 minutes maximal learning length right all right any time for questions about games that Julie's working on or the research that they've conducted or so for a high school student that wants to supplement their classroom instruction would linger ago be a good platform absolutely yep oh sorry the question was for a high school student wanting to supplement their language learning would linger to go be a good option and the answer is yes we have high school students all over the country who've just started using it and find it to be really middle school as well it's free yep there is a way to sort of level up quicker if you spend money but no one thus far really has needed to so we have all kinds of data no one spent very much money which is good I like that it's okay so everybody has dual linguals so how is it different from that in a perfect world you use them both together dual lingo is all about grammar translation and one to one lexical meaning so in other words you translate something and you learn the one to one lexical meaning if we take the word like coffee which I just used the reality is there are lots of meanings for the word coffee and so dual lingo misses that if you really want to drill vocabulary right if we're looking at high frequency drilling vocabulary only dual lingo is not a bad choice if you want to do that in combination with this more comprehensive picture linger to goes the way to go you get still you still get lexicon it's not void of that it's just shelled within language functions 25 words a unit is essentially what you get and how could they like be cared to like engage with adults once I work on a lot of adult LC learners and they're always looking for new ways to practice the language and more like functional community than the other so it's something like this like to like almost do not them so we have it I mean we don't have a ton of empirical data yet on linger to go it's pretty brand new but we I've seen I mean so I was just with a group of my parents friends actually and I'm like could you want to stop playing we're actually supposed to be doing something so I think that that's definitely I don't think that's a sort of a diagnostic in that space when we're talking about commercial games it just depends on the group of people right there are some groups of adult learners who are way into sort of the game space if not so more than some of the college kids who have all these other competing priorities in other instances it's like I'm not touching a video game from a mile away so it's sort of having to pick what's best we always try to just give choices I mean I think that's what I've learned the most about this kind of work it's a little bit more work but just giving one game is a bad choice in other words not everyone engages with the same kinds of games even and so some people love shooter games some people hate them some people are adamantly opposed to them and so if that's the only option you give that's I'm not advocating shooter games for the record unless you have learners who are really into that anyway and I'm like please play in French and so sorry I don't know if that answers your question yeah but then also like especially like more like elderly players yeah may not be super technologically adapt so how do how can we like engage engage them so I used has anyone heard of Samba de amigo it's a Portuguese game it's a Portuguese music game actually and it's for the we and what's super cool about it is you actually play along and then all these words sort of spice Portuguese that's a little different there are other ones I think actually now available in other languages my 85 year old and 90 year old grandparents loved it can we play that game thing you have Julia right because you can sit you can do it there was some really fun stuff around that and so it's just a matter of sort of finding the right game I think we have a database on that games to teach side that gets you going there about now 150 games I think in the database and so it's worth digging into and you can put in the language and everything available in that language pops up and then you can start sort of digging through I'd highly advocate playing at least two hours of any game before you put it in any classroom just like we'd never show a film we haven't watched we shouldn't use a game we've never played I know it seems obvious like you'd be so surprised I gave this to my students and I can't believe I'm like did you play like it's in level two right those kinds of things so yeah it's actually great for courses taught in blended learning environment absolutely business learning classes for language learning so I have two questions one is do you have any data that shows you know assessment data that shows those courses but using game learning as a part of the whole language learning it's produced more or superior student learning outcomes compared to a regular class which you don't use in all these learnings and the second question is it's more practical if I'm the language instructor if I want to assign a game for my students how do I sign that like do I tell them okay just do unit one and what's unit one in a game you know so you're tired yeah yeah so to answer your first question there are a couple studies that have looked at control groups as compared to sort of a game based group looking at lexicon in some cases in my case the data actually bears out no difference I think the trick is the field is too new to give you an actual empirical answer to that I would love to be able to say yeah of course games are superior that's not true what we don't know is if games are superior at giving us a more comfort it's a different picture right it actually gives us a way to teach the things we haven't been teaching in classrooms so is it better than I don't actually think games are better at teaching vocab and structure we can do just as well with sticky notes better maybe right we can sort them we can create maps we can do all kinds of things what games are better at is saying hey language is more than just the words language has this whole other world around it and that's what we should pay attention to what we know about linger to go for example is it has some more philurgical games and some of the puzzle stuff which digs them into some of that but it again isn't just about sort of the unit and the chapter test so a lot has to do with the research design the questions we're asking the perspectives we're looking at it from Jonathan Dahan has done some really interesting work on lexical learning and he's actually found no difference if anything the game learners did less maybe the players than you know so I think we have to approach this field with a discerning eye just like we do with everything else the trick is the potential there is so clear and the way to get at pragmatics specifically at these more macro level skills is what really is interesting I think that's that's my perspective that's not everyone's absolutely I'm also wondering if there is if we would look at AFET and the ability to get and keep students more engaged to sustain that engagement over a lot of periods yes which might go with motivation yeah yeah I mean I would argue motivation is the result not the reason so I've said that last not everyone agrees with that and it's changing and shifting and dynamic but yes I think that is a real key point it gives you the ability to actually give learners engagement in their own domain right if someone wants to play a soccer sort of simulation game perfect if another learner has no interest in that they just want to do art they can do flower right there are all these sort of different pieces around getting at that sort of space that yeah absolutely gets at some learners hate it to be very clear I'd love to stand up here and be like yes games are the way to go it's not that it's that they're really worth our attention to get some better understanding of what's good and bad about them so literally most of your work and most people here are interested second language acquisition do you know of any work in this field being done with people with language learning disabilities language acquisition disabilities like autism or other disabilities is that yeah that's probably one of my favorite areas actually so they've been using avatars in games for autism but so neuroatubical sort of training for kids and for and hugely important results right so pragmatics is actually what tends to be void right in the brain so the inability to do pragmatics with language is what we see on sort of the autism asperger spectrum and so actually you can they've found with kids specifically and I don't know about adults because it's not my area as well but I've read a lot of work where they can actually train with avatars and you start by having no eye contact and then they can actually systematically create eye contact with the avatar that the learner doesn't feel uncomfortable with so with humans we either have eye contact or we have no eye contact right with avatars it can be sort of a slip and they can actually computerize what that glance looks like and that has been pretty effective in terms of a therapeutic intervention for getting learners used to like oh I'm comfortable with this now and then they can make the avatars more and more realistic and so they've seen a lot of benefit with that kind of work for kids we haven't done it yet we're not getting there my hope is something like linger to go actually it's fully screen reader compatible so we can start looking at sort of blindness and deafness in languages using sort of all of the stuff that's already there on our phones we're not there yet we have a graduate student who's interested in doing that kind of work though so there's tons of potential and actually quite a bit of grant money out there to do work especially with language training and sort of narrowly typical spaces in avatars and games yeah there's quite a bit the whole idea of like mediation is really important so it's not face to face so when people like Julie said therapeutic interventions so people who have social problems sometimes because it's mediated and it's not so direct it's easy for them to actually have these interactions and even do like eye contact but you're not really looking at their eyes you're looking at the camera and all those kinds of things so yeah it's eight years ago I put my son in front of Rosetta Stone Spanish we didn't have any other Spanish input and he learned Spanish grammar and gender before he learned English yeah I believe it I believe it there's a really cool I wish I could remember the name there's a super cool program for kids with avatar interaction stuff that's really really effective we don't have very good data on it yet but in second language especially but I've always been sort of compelled by it in terms of yeah maybe we're going the right way that's the trick right interdisciplinary I have a question about the meta analysis you did of all the studies that are looking at ICC and pragmatic competence and what is that so I agree it's like kind of people don't know exactly what it is but so I was thinking you wrote down your these four areas and is that you went over quickly I pick at the very end I pick is the assessment major to get at that model yeah okay so we're calling that the IPIC model right interactional pragmatic in our cultural competence okay and that is for the four so it's kind of a mess up but knowledge analysis subjectivity awareness and so when you you said that it you haven't really done this yet but with OPIs or other kinds of measures of like functional language ability that you'll be able to do some kind of comparative testing so basically I pick exist as a as a as a test but you haven't really done it yet I pick exist as a storyboarded test that is almost ready to pilot two weeks from now okay that will be built out hopefully as part of the next cycle so the goal of this cycle was to do the theoretical analysis and figure out what the heck we are going to actually test so to find the construct and that's where we're at so yeah I mean we're getting there for sure but no it's not ready as a test quite yet but the pilot stuff we're looking at as we go and is it based on performance or is it also like metalinguistic awareness both both yeah performance and performance actually so both production and perception as well as metalinguistic and reflective protocols okay yeah that's good yeah so the reflective protocols and the more subjective assessment pieces will be done with inter-rater reliability stuff and looking at Raiders and then the others objective built-ins the algorithms of the machine oh is it online it'll be a simulation yeah so it'll be a full online game simulation module that goes with it probably 2D I don't know that we gain anything in 3D so it'll be an avatar-based game kind of simulation right assigned in this board or is this played in the classroom I've seen it done all kinds of different ways so Mentira we actually put it in as a full unit in a fourth semester Spanish course so we did it for a full month once a week half the class period and then they went out as the field trip was the two hours out in the neighborhood finding their clues then they did a trial in the course it replaced one oral presentation where they did two days of oral presentations and no unless it right so that was where that went I've seen the wrap round activities be used as extra credits you could go that far off the end of the spectrum what we know though is that integration in the classroom environment is more important than just hey here's a homework thing to do so if you really want to get at the issues especially in the games to teach games if you really want to dig into economics and you really want to dig into health care issues and racism you can't leave learners to their own devices right they need someone to scaffold that and that's what our job is right as professors and instructors is help them sort of dig through and the game gives you a space to add some protection in terms of like yeah let's dig in but you don't actually have to know my perspectives all the time you got to just look at what happens in the game and let them sort of co-construct and construct their realities based on those experiences so and the trick is sort of creating a disposition not a right answer right an openness to be willing to engage in these issues we sort of stay away from them for good reason in some cases right but especially in high school environments so these are actually being used as well in high schools which is even more sort of tenuous right how do we talk about this stuff grading rubrics I didn't answer your question so the best way to grade I think in these cases is rubrics based on your learning outcome classic backwards design what do I want my learners to know how am I going to grade it any other questions thank you for your attention on a Friday