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Monday, March 24, 2014

Gaming in the Classroom: Thoughts on RPGs for ESL

One thought I keep mulling around is playing RPGs with my students. I teach ESL at a private school. My students are almost all native Japanese speakers, with a small mix of native bilinguals and the occasional English-primary Japanese-secondary speakers. I keep thinking, I'd like to run an RPG for them. And that RPGs are a great way to engage with the language, use it, and give you a direct and consistent need to learn it.

First, you might want to plow through this article on the subject:
Collaborative Non-Linear Narrative Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the ESL Classroom

Some of what I discuss below is covered a bit in that article.

The main obstacle, really, is making it an educational activity. I wouldn't be running the game for free, and thus parents would be paying tuition/class fees for each and every game session. Education would need to be primary. In simpler terms, the game must be worth paying to play, and the game must directly benefit the English skills of the players each and every class. It would be different if I was running the game for free, but then the parameters change greatly - not the least of which is that I'd be running the game for my fun, not their education. The rest of this post assumes running a game as a school/ESL/learning activity that costs money to participate in.

I've tried games in the past that were fun (Awful Green Things, for example) but didn't require a lot of English to succeed, and thus weren't very educational. I've also some that require a surprising amount of English to master (Fluxx 3.0 is my favorite, but Go Fish is exactly like this). I've run games that needed no English (Chess), but taught them with English. RPGs require a lot of English and have a bit of a learning curve - you can probably add English-weak students to a group but not start an English-weak and gaming-inexperienced group and expect to get much.


Below is a mix of ideas, quandaries, and other issues I'm mulling over. This is very early drawing board type stuff; I have no plans yet to present this as a school club or after school class.

Logistics of Play

Rotating Player Pool. I'd need to deal smoothly with missing players, changing players, one-try drop ins, etc. Death of a PC would need to be smoothly handled with a replacement or repair because the goal isn't a challenging play experience but learning English though use. "You die, next time do better" is the same as "Stop using English, class is over for you." Ever been in a spelling bee and got knocked out early? Not very productive. In a one-on-one class, I could do it that way - simply start over - but not with a group.

Naturally this would also mean I'd need to deal with totally new player with no game experience. I'd have to assume that at any time a new person might join.

Rotating Caller. I think a caller would be a good idea. This allows those with strong speech to shine, and those with weaker speech to have to talk. It would also organize the game a little - it wouldn't be many-on-one teacher. The teacher/GM can assist the caller or players, but the caller would be responsible for passing on what happens.

It also feeds into the Japanese cultural tradition of student-directed activities.

I think a rotating caller - every X minutes, say - could be a good approach. This would both allow those who speak English better to assist those with weaker English. Rotating may also prevent those with poor English from being shielded from speech.

I'd allow the caller to parrot speech from better speakers - basically, being a mouthpiece for things they don't know how to say. Especially for children, I've seen this work wonders. I've taught games and had teachers or other students coach kids on what to say line by line or word by word . . . and they start to pick it up by rote at least and then catch the meaning and usage. If other students do the prompting, it's even better - it gives confidence to the prompter and the kids seem to pay attention more and try harder to remember it. Peer pressure beats superior pressure, I guess.

How about the system?

So what about the rules?

Point Buy

If you're worked with kids, fairness is their primary concern. They define fairness differently than adults, too. In my experience they like fairness of results more than fairness of chances.

I've had a kid get really upset because I gave everyone a chance to read one sentence out loud, and then opened it up to volunteers to read more . . . as he saw it, dividing 15 worksheet sentences amongst 9 kids meant some people got 2 tries and some didn't, and it bothered him. Not only that, one kid went twice before he went twice, but he'd read sentence #1 and she read #3, so to him she was going out of turn. From a teacher's perspective, it meant everyone got to try reading, and I was able to dish out an extra challenge to the better readers and to the ones who really needed extra work. I've had kids cry because someone going first wasn't fair because that kid got to go first during a previous teacher's class so it wasn't fair that I let the kid go first, too.

So "It's fair that everyone rolls 3d in order" sounds like a great way to get crying kids who didn't roll that well. "Everyone gets 100 points" or "everyone gets an 18, a 16, a 14, a 12, and two 10s to put where they want" is going to save me a giant load of tears and arguments. And vastly speed up chargen!

If I run GURPS, I'd probably use very simple templates (basically, nearly complete characters with a series of A or B menu choices) or the Buckets system from Alternate GURPS III.

System Mastery Isn't An Obstacle.

I'd like a relatively simple system, so I'm split between an old game (Basic D&D, say) or stripping down a new game (GURPS Lite). A lot of rules isn't a big issue, though, because to master the system they'll need to master English. Rewarding players who demonstrate reading comprehension by finding rules that benefit them, or knowing the good rules option - that's no different that scoring kids higher for reading, writing, spelling, etc. I'm fine with rewarding kids who put extra time into learning the game rules.

Still, the basics of the game must be simple enough that "mastery" is "getting better" not "learning how to play effectively in the first place." That's why I'm thinking GURPS Lite or Basic D&D or something of that sort. Both require extremely minimal explanation.

Easy to Consistently Implement. It would be nice if I could quickly and easily teach other teachers how to run the game. That way they could cover my class when I'm away and run their own RPG-based classes. The consistency aspect would mean that we'd be running it in a close enough fashion that the classes were accomplishing the same things and not establishing a different standard for use of English or acceptable levels of native language usage for a given grade level.

Cost. Ideally, the materials would be cheap or free, so I don't need a layout or a big reimbursement request.

Kid-Safe Materials. Sorry, no nudity, guys doing bloody Mortal Kombat death strikes, cursing, murderous rages, etc. in the illustrations or examples. I work for a school, so this is non-negotiable. I'd want to be able to encourage the parents to look into the system without worrying that they might find something adult-oriented in their kid's class materials.

Non-Confusing Game Name. This might make D&D a no-go, unless Next is so awesome that I run that. If I play D&D with the kids and they like it and go to the store and buy D&D, it's going to be a different edition. If I play Swords & Wizardry, they might end up with Complete or White Box or something else. This is pushing me towards something like GURPS Lite - there is only one extant version of GURPS, and finding 3e stuff is harder than finding 4e stuff. It makes games like Basic Fantasy Role-Playing slightly worrisome because there is also Basic Roleplaying, and it's not the same game at all.

Good Grammar! Seriously, games with weird writing styles or grammar/spelling errors are out. It's an English class! I love Labyrinth Lord but it's got some odd phrasings in the book. I love AD&D but Gygax makes up his own words sometimes, and uses oddly stylized tones occasionally. Vancian English is great, but it's not ideal for ESL.

Those are my thoughts so far. I'll keep digging at this until I feel like I've thought through the issues enough to make it worth proposing and trying. I think it's an activity with an enormous upside for the students who participate, but it's not without its complications and problems.

36 comments:

  1. I've worked in education, and my wife is a fifteen year veteran of elementary school teaching. I think you're onto something when you focus as much as you do on fairness.

    It's a lesson that we should all take from your thoughts here, as we aren't always blessed with the most emotionally mature player base to work with in our hobby - especially at cons and pick-up games at game stores. Understanding that these less well-developed folks may be seeing things through an elementary school prism of "fairness" might explain some of their otherwise frankly baffling behaviors.

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    1. It might. Still, an adult has no excuse to have the same view of fairness as a 6-year old. :)

      I don't think I said it outright, above, but I teach kids from 5-adult, and I'd probably need to accept kids 6-12 in the same group. That would mean it needs to be 6-7 year old level in terms of ease of understanding and with an eye to what they think is fair, but also able to engage older kids. Tough call, I know. I might be better if I try it as a short (30 minutes?) activity as part of the more age-segregated groups I get sometimes.

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    2. Might _Hero Kids_ or something like it suit, then? A game that's already working under the assumption of a juvenile audience might save you some time.

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    3. I'll look into Hero Kids, thanks.

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  2. One wonders if, out there on the fringes of what we call RPGs, "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" would be suitable. The faux-Georgian style would certainly be an obstacle, but the actual rules could easily be summarized in a page or so, and there are ready-made variants ("My Uncle, The Baron") for younger players.

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    1. In that context I'd also be taking a hard look at Fiasco.

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    2. I've been eying Prince Valiant for exactly that reason. But my concern is, if I customize a game, how do I get copies out to the players and parents? Ideally I'd have something I could literally just hand them for free, or tell them where to buy.

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  3. I'd be inclined use a stripped-back GURPS like Dungeon Fantasy or Action, with practically pre-gen characters – and actually Action seems more relevant in terms of the vocabulary you're needing to exercise ("humvee" rather than "glaive"). It's also suited to short television-episode-type play sessions, so you don't need to worry about people dropping in and out; each meeting is a new episode.

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    1. Action might be tough for a younger crowd, though - it's a little easier if I make things fantasy-ish and not pseudo-realism.

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  4. You might try Fate Core, or the "lite" version, Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE). The game is run on "Aspects", a word, phrase, or short sentence describing a person or thing. To do something nifty, a player must figure out how to relate a skill they have to an aspect of what they are interacting with, and express it in a way that works within the game logic. Part of the game is creating the world the game is set in, by defining the worlds aspects. It's a very numbers light system, but heavy on language, as you often have to justify how one aspect ties in with another.

    FAE even has a cartoon look to it's illustrations, and plays up the episodic nature of such. FAE also does away with skills, replacing them with six "Approaches", such as Flashy, Sneaky, or Forceful. It also has it's "Stunts" (the players special moves) in a form of a "Mad Libs" fill in the blank.

    And, if you want something more "DnDish", Green Ronin has converted it's Freeport setting to Fate (FAE actually), replacing the approaches with the classic DnD stat names.

    The only down side is that the game uses Fudge dice (they, of course, call them Fate dice), But, you can make your own out of regular d6s, or use two "opposed" d6s.

    Over all, it is a very flexible game, intended to be hacked to your needs. They even have a toolkit book to help you hack it! And, as it has a "you can try it, if you can explain it" kind of play, it may work well in teaching language.

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  5. P.S. Just reading the cost/distribution concern above, Fate and FAE can be downloaded for free from the publishers site, as it is on a "pay what you want" system. They charge for the other books, but are essentially giving the base game away. And, they have open licensed the game (ogl or cc options, your choice), so you can mod away, and then give away.

    http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/
    http://www.faterpg.com/licensing/

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    1. I'll take a look, but what I know of FATE is largely from seeing Doug and Leonard talk about it here:
      http://gamingballistic.blogspot.com/2013/11/gaming-ballistics-firing-squad-leonard.html

      It sounds pretty involved.

      Defining traits and skills and aspects seems pretty front-loaded work. I'd like something more pick-up-and-play. GURPS might not seem that way, but it can be for me.

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    2. If you do think you might go with FAE - something that I can totally see working - it's also available in a very pretty online SRD at fate-srd.com, along with the system hacking guide and the full version of Fate Core.

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    3. People tend to shy away from using the phrases "story telling", "free form", and "make it up as you go", because it makes some gamers run away screaming. But, they CAN be applied to Fate, if you want. In fact, the game assumes that you have no front-load at all. You come up with three aspects (High Concept, Trouble, and one other), your skills or approaches, and one stunt. And you are ready to go. The world creation aspects are just part of the characters.

      So, if your High Concept said the character is a "Knight of the Red Order", you just created the "Red Order", and the detail that they have knights. Then, for your Trouble, you say that the character has an enemy called the "Bishop of the Black Order", now we have the "Black Order", and start to get a chess feel to both orders. We don't know how the orders relate, or what kind of organizations they are (yet), but we know that they exist.

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  6. If you're still pondering D&D systems, you might want to check Dark Dungeons it's a reto-clone of the Rules Cyclopedia (final version of the Basic route), and as I recall the English is pretty straight forward. (Non-professional editing of course....)

    It might still wander a bit far afield in places, but it is what I'd go to if I ran D&D again.

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    1. I'd have concerns with name confusion, there - the first Google Hit I got was anti-roleplaying tracts, not the retro-clone.

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  7. Toon!

    Its funny, you can do Cartoon characters as in Adventure Time etc

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    1. That's a good one as well!

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    2. I've heard of but never played Toon. I may even own a copy, somewhere. But I think it might be a little too light and loose for what I'm thinking.

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    3. Toon is certainly light, but in addition to being possibly too light and too loose, it may carry the burden of assumptions drawn from a particular body of cartoons which your students may not know well, if they've seen them at all. My experience has also been that comedy is harder than it looks for most people, so while it aspires to brilliant whackiness, it's a rare batch of players who can make it worse. Still, worth a close reading if you happen to have it somewhere.

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    4. Going to disagree with you there. A few weeks ago I sat down with a Vietnamese 5 yr old who didnt speak a word of English watching Tom and Jerry repeats and both of us were laughing our heads of. And I grew up hating Tom and Jerry. It was feed from a US cable channel so I assume this sort of thing is still on.

      I think Toon is quite capable of pulling off something like the Simpsons movie, which is a pretty standard RPG plot (for a cartoon :))

      As for comedy I think just playing the situation relatively straight and letting the natural absurdity allow the kids to make their own jokes would work. Its easy to make kids laugh!

      Though I do wonder about Toon for 2014. Maybe a patch to GURPS 4e and some ideas would make a good pyramid article? Anybody? Anybody?

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    5. It's not that they wouldn't like the source material, but that I'd have to assume some familiarity with the source material. And then be able to keep doing it. I'm not a comedy GM. I'm not a superhero or horror GM, either. So I need to find something that fits my style, so I can focus on the English I elicit more than keeping the comedy flowing.

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    6. Ok beating a dead horse...

      GURPS Ultralite?

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    7. GURPS Ultralite is possible, but it's a big change from regular GURPS. I'm not sure it's going to get me anything I couldn't get otherwise from GURPS Lite.

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  8. It's interesting that you aren't rejecting D&D simply for the religious stigma. Is that totally gone now? When I in High School in the early 90s it was still a big deal. I was president of the gaming club, and I had to deal with this directly with the Dean of Students, who had gotten the idea from some letters from the members of the Christian Club to the school paper.

    I couldn't imagine a classroom actually using D&D educationally without a large outcry by fundamentalist students and parents. Has this totally changed? I still occasionally read an anti-D&D screed online.

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    1. I teach at a Japanese school, they don't even know what D&D is, nevermind some leftover 80s crud about devils and such.

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    2. Ah, I thought you were back in the states for some reason. Charismatic Christians are definitely a small minority in Japan. I do wonder if it would be an issue in the US today though (or the Republic of Korea, for that matter).

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    3. Oh, I'm in the states, but I teach in a private Japanese school.

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  9. I'm curious if Lady Blackbird [http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/] (or one of its reskins) would be suitable for you needs. It's free, which helps, and it's only 17 pages, which helps, and the characters are all pregenerated so there's no need to worry about fairness in creating characters. It might be good for an experiment, at least, since there's no outlay on your part and the setup time is minimal.

    The largest problem I see if that the game encourages people to talk over each other, which might be intimidating for some of the weaker speakers.

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    1. I'll download that - I'd just read your play experience post today.

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  10. Here are a few initial thoughts:

    A group of 6-7 year olds would be a challenge. Attension span, reading comprehension, etc.

    For that age group, a rule light/simple system is paramont. I would be tempted to go as far as making it so they didn't need to learn any rule system per se, but just had a couple simple mechanics to do at first (they tell you want they want to do in English, you tell them to roll under number X to succeed). I would also drop normal social interaction mechanisms (e.g,, Diplomancy and Fast-Talk rolls in GUPRS), and let them talk it out for the practice.

    If a group of them are all interested in something similar, like: Harry Potter, My Little Ponies, Magic School Bus, Muppets, The Lego Movie, etc.; you might be able to pull them together. But you may have to work fast, since they may shift to something new before you get the first scenario written up.

    Otherwise, you might have to work from the common reference of real life: e.g., "You are all playing out in the school playground when X finds a small green box under the slide, ...", "We all go on a field trip to The X museum when...", etc.

    From there let them gain super powers, find a way to a fantasy land, travel through time, be transformed into giant shape changing robots, etc.

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  11. There's a diceless game called Active Exploits you might want to check out. The core rules are free and then there are several expansions and settings which you can buy.

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  12. Fascinating. As a foreign language teacher (French) this intrigues me.

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  13. I'm a middle school special education teacher and I've been playing Pathfinder with my students for about 3 months now. Figured I'd share my experience. Obviously I have very different goals and needs in my classroom compared to yours, but I really enjoyed reading about your experience so I figured I'd share.

    I run it twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. My student's academic abilities range from 1st to 3rd grade in mathematics and ELA. This group is higher functioning than previous classrooms I have had, so I am able to run it. At first I thought it would be a fun distraction for math as there is a good deal of addition and subtraction. However, it has become something so much more. Over the last few months my students, diagnosis ranging from autism, other health impaired, intellectually disabled, and emotionally disturbed have slowly changed their mentality from that of individuals to more of a group focus. They have since begun to communicate with each other and have shown improvements in not only thinking about others, but socialization skills as well.

    Though in my own gaming experience I never used visuals or models of any kind, I use a lot for my students. Here is a site where student's can't individualize their characters if visuals are something you use or are interested in: http://www.ageofgames.net/en/fantasyavatar/fantasy-avatar.html

    Works great with my kiddos.

    I don't deal in the world of "fair" with my kiddos. Now to clarify, I make sure that they share the limelight equally and I orient the story toward those that may not have been given the opportunity to play a major part. However, I think it is important for them to realize that not everything in life works out or goes the way you want it to. They don't always take it well, but their coping abilities have drastically changed from throwing tantrums to, in many cases, laughing about their plight. Two have lost characters and have actually dealt with the situation very well where at first they would growl or "rage quit" when a roll was low.

    I'm sure I could go on. However, I just now noticed that the posts here are about two years old. If you are interested in exchanging ideas, please respond and perhaps we could exchange emails.

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    1. Sean, thanks for sharing your experiences. I haven't been in a position to use gaming with my students for a while now. Plus, we've re-arranged some things at the school so I think they'd be less open to me using gaming unless a parent specifically requested it. So I don't have much to add to any discussion of the subject right now.

      But if I get to gaming with students again, if you don't mind I'm going to look you up and see if your experiences can make my classroom gaming better!

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    2. Sounds great! That's too bad that you've been unable to continue it. As I mentioned before, I've made some really big progress with my students. Hope your year is going well!

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