Now that you know, more or less, what a role-playing game is, I’m going to explain why they’re such an effective tool for learning or improving your English. Basically, it’s because (I’ll give you a hint and then explain): they create a very intense, artificial language immersion experience. There you have it… I’ll explain later. But before going into more detail, I want to clarify who might benefit from them and who might not, and who will find this system most effective.
Let me start with those who don’t: it’s completely useless if you don’t know a word of English, that is to say if your level is absolutely zero and they send you to the beginner’s course at any language school to recite the alphabet and the days of the week. If that’s your situation, I’m sorry, but we can’t do anything for you. You’ll have to enroll in a regular course first and dedicate at least a year or two to it before we can help you…
Now, in reality, it’s very difficult to find a complete beginner these days. I mean, unless you’ve recently been thawed out after spending 50 or 60 years frozen solid, you’re bound to know some English. You’ve been to primary and secondary school, I’d say, and somehow, you’ve picked up a few words; or you’ve heard a song or two, or seen a perfume ad where they speak English, anything at all… Anyway, we’re not in the 80s and 90s anymore, when they made primary school teachers teach English without having a clue. Nowadays, more or less everyone has studied English and has some knowledge stored in their memory.
The problem is that, in many cases, we find it very difficult to use the knowledge we already have, and we prefer to admit we don’t know a word of English rather than try to draw on our repertoire. This brings us to a group of people for whom an English-language fantasy role-playing game could be very beneficial. These people typically have the following profile: they have studied English repeatedly (at school, in high school, at an academy, at work, on their own, etc.) but never quite become fluent. They study a grammar topic, do exercises, learn some vocabulary, struggle with listening, and can read, even if they don’t understand everything, but they don’t make progress. Above all, they are frustrated by their inability to hold a spontaneous conversation in English (and they generally don’t have many opportunities to do so).
Okay. So this is the profile I think our games would be best suited for. I repeat: people with some background in the language, who have accumulated passive knowledge, but who don’t feel capable of using those resources freely and spontaneously. The reasons can be varied, and surely several are combined, but I think that, far from appealing to the fear of making mistakes or the proverbial inability of Spaniards to speak other languages, the truth is that the methodology has failed. It’s too predictable and responds to overly simplistic educational objectives.
Let me explain… Imagine this situation: you’re in English class; you’ve just studied a grammar topic and completed a series of exercises in class designed to reinforce your newly acquired knowledge; you listen to an audio recording where that grammatical feature is used repeatedly, and finally, you’re given a conversation activity to try and use it. You learn it, successfully complete the exercises, and a few weeks go by. What’s left? Obviously, you can review the topic and, when the time comes, pass an exam that includes, among other things, exercises related to that feature. But does this represent a decisive step in your mastery of the language? Not at all. Have you achieved your goal of mastering the language, of becoming fluent? No, not really. What’s the problem?
Two things are wrong. First, the approach. The study of grammatical rules essentially serves to make a competent speaker of a language aware of the grammatical rules that govern the language he already uses. What’s natural, what happens with our native language, is that we handle these rules without being aware of their existence. For example, a Roman in the first century BC spoke Latin and used grammatical cases (the accusative, the dative, and all that) without being aware that he was doing so. We ourselves learn to match tenses, persons, genders, numbers, moods, etc., without having the slightest idea that we are doing it. We learn it as children, unconsciously, through mechanisms that I don’t think even developmental neuroscience can explain.
Then we go to school and they put us in a language class where they explain that something is the direct object of something else and that in a passive sentence certain thing happens. Okay. That’s all well and good, but what we’re really doing is dissecting our own language. It’s like we’ve learned to play football and not be offside without even being aware that there’s an offside rule. We do it right, we only get past the defender when a teammate has passed us the ball, but we hadn’t even noticed the linesmen. Then we go to school, to physical education class, and they explain to us what we were doing: playing by the rules.
With foreign languages, especially if we learn them as adults, after a period of formal schooling, we do the exact opposite. We lack the experience; we don’t know how to acquire it. It would seem absurd to walk into a classroom and have the teacher speak to us like babies, repeating simple words for months: dad, mom, poop, baby, pee… In fact, it would be absurd… And we try to replace what we lack through the formal study of grammatical rules. Just the opposite of how we learn our native language. We try to progress in our usage by following a manual with its rules, as if speaking and assembling a bookshelf were more or less the same thing. It doesn’t work. We get stuck. Most of us get stuck and go around the same points again and again. And because we get stuck, we get frustrated. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about.
There’s another problem, too: the mechanics are far too predictable. Let me explain: imagine you have to give a presentation in English class. You have to talk for five minutes about a topic you’ve chosen, as if you were giving a short lecture. What do we do in a situation like that? We prepare. We choose a topic we’re familiar with, obviously, and spend an afternoon preparing our presentation. We write it down. Worse: we write it first in Spanish and then translate it into English. Then we check it with some computer tool to make sure we’re not making any serious grammatical errors and we look up the pronunciation of difficult words. Then we memorize it and finally we practice to make sure the presentation goes perfectly.
That’s all well and good if our primary goal was to impress the whole class, or to get a pat on the back from the teacher. But that wasn’t our goal, and it shouldn’t even be the goal of this activity. Our goal should be to be able to explain any topic we’re familiar with in passable English without any preparation, because we already know the subject. In other words, if I know about financial markets, particle physics, or Japanese history, what I need to achieve is being able to talk about that topic, which I already know, in a language that isn’t my own with a degree of fluency. Not flawlessly, with pronunciation so perfect they can’t tell if I’m from West Texas or Milwaukee, but fluently, in a natural way.
If my goal is to achieve this, the worst thing I can do is prepare, translate, and memorize it. In fact, that way I’m just shooting myself in the foot. I learn absolutely nothing, and I also get used to pretending I’m actively and spontaneously using resources that I only master passively and reflectively. I don’t truly grasp them, and what’s worse, they pile up in my linguistic backpack without me actually having them at my disposal.
Two mistakes, then, one in the approach and the other in the execution. The result is what you already know: stagnation, the inability to use the language freely, and enormous difficulty in progressing. Our only consolation is being told we’re an A2.2 or a B1.1 or some other such nonsense, and being given a piece of paper that says we have a First or a First and a Half certificate.
Fantasy role-playing forces you to do the exact opposite: it places you in a specific situation, along with other characters, and requires you to constantly adapt. It systematically stifles any attempt by players to use pre-prepared language and forces them to interact with their companions and non-player characters in a constantly changing environment. You can’t, for example, come prepared with a script from home, because you don’t know what’s going to happen in the game session. In fact, the first thing you have to do is pay attention to the game master’s description of the situation, to get a sense of the context. You have to focus all your attention on this, since your character’s life is at stake. And then, react exactly as your character would.
Initially, your way of responding and interacting might be very simple: short, straightforward sentences, lacking sophisticated grammar, with pronunciation errors, repeated requests for clarification of the scene’s details, or requests for help expressing an idea or intention for which you lack the words. The important thing is that you’ll make the effort to mobilize your passive resources on each turn, and that two minutes later, faced with a situation that has changed due to the game’s own course, you’ll have to improvise again.
Then, almost without realizing it, the following will happen: you’ll become completely immersed in the game, prioritizing your character’s objectives over your own. In fact, you’ll forget you’re even taking an English course and will dedicate yourself entirely to the game. For example, you’ll be more concerned with your character treating a nasty leg cut to prevent them from bleeding out while their companions try to keep the door of a ruined tower closed, than with jotting down the vocabulary you’re learning in a notebook or making sure you’re using a connector correctly (our conversation assistant will take care of that when necessary, but I’ll explain that in the next post). In short, there will come a point when you’ll only be playing, and while you’re playing the adventure, your brain will be doing its own thing: organizing, assimilating, and making available what you’re looking for.
Our goal is precisely that: for you to forget you’re learning a language and focus on the game, so that the mechanisms involved in language comprehension and production work spontaneously. In fact, after you’ve been playing for a while, something very curious will happen: you’ll become familiar with the environment, you’ll start using resources you already have more freely and acquiring new ones, and when you recall a session days later, you’ll be surprised to remember the game situations and conversations with the Game Master and other players as if they had taken place in your own language, even though you had them in English.
Anyway, this has gone on much longer than I expected. I’ll just add one thing: games are also a very valuable resource for those who already have a good command of English and simply want to practice conversation. But I’ll dedicate another post to that later.
I hope this has at least piqued your curiosity.
See you.