David Neville, assistant professor of German and director of language learning technologies at Elon University, has been awarded a fellowship to participate in the Summer Humanities Gaming Institute, to be held June 7-25, at the University of South Carolina.
The institute is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and will bring together twenty teachers and researchers, faculty and advanced graduate students from diverse humanities disciplines to pursue a three-week investigation of how games might concretely advance humanistic teaching and research. Luminary experts and emerging innovators in game studies and development will also attend to assist in developing games that can scale to meet participants’ research and teaching needs in the humanities.
David Neville’s application was selected from a national pool of submissions and describes the development of a 3D digital game-based learning environment for second language acquisition.
Work is currently under way on the project, which seeks to develop a 3D graphic adventure game that requires students to navigate a virtual German train station and environs while meeting specific instructional goals such as purchasing a train ticket, locating the appropriate track, making sense of arrival and departure tables, and interacting with non-player characters (NPCs). It is theorized that the sense of presence fostered by a virtual 3D game environment, when coupled with targeted and well-designed language instruction, will assist in the process of second language acquisition by situating knowledge of the target language within simulated real-world sociocultural contexts.
Elon University students with digital art, German language, and computer science backgrounds have collaborated on the project in the past, presenting their research findings at the annual Spring Undergraduate Research Forum. In addition, the project regularly informs the task-based approach to German 321, an intermediate German conversation course offered at Elon University, in which students are required to adopt the persona of a NPC in the game, conduct library research on how the sociocultural backgrounds of their NPC could potentially influence his or her speech acts, and then create a branching dialogue tree that shares points of connection with other adopted NPCs in the course.
