Anne-Marie Barrault-Méthy, Germano Vera Cruz, Marion Del Bove & Marie Seye

ABSTRACT

Although the share of video game industry in the global entertainment economy has gone up in the past decades (Marchand & Hennig-Thurau 2013), and that students seem to have played video games more since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic (Balhara et al., 2020), game play is still marginal in the language classroom (Aden 2008, Lapaire & Masse 2008). The present research is a preliminary study before developing a serious game for Bachelor’s degree learners of English for Legal Purposes in order to adjustthe future scenario to students’ gamer profiles. What is, then, the gamer profile of students of English for Legal Purposes? To answer this question, two questionnaires were presented to 2,500 Law Bachelor’s degree students of the University of Bordeaux and Université Lyon 3 (France). The first questionnaire was mostly established along a player satisfaction model called Brain-Hex (Mandryk, 2014) that defines seven broad classes of gamers, namely Seeker, Survivor, Daredevil, Mastermind, Conqueror, Socialiser and Achiever, as well as sub-classes. Students were then asked to play an existing serious game about the United Kingdom Parliament, MP for a Week. They eventually responded to another questionnaire on the effects of the game on their understanding of the English for Legal Purposes lecture and of the lecture on game play, followed by a personality model test, the Big Five Inventory (Plaisant et al., 2010). Early results of the questionnaires will be presented.

Keywords

Play, informal learning, serious game, English for Legal Purposes, game-mediated language learning, blended learning, BrainHex, Big Five Inventory

References

1. Aden, J. (2008). Compétences interculturelles en didactique des langues : développer l’empathie par la théâtralisation [Intercultural Competencies in language didactics: developing empathy through dramatisation]. In J. Aden (Ed.), Apprentissages des langues et pratiques artistiques [Language learning through artistic practice] (pp.67-102). Éditions le Manuscrit.

2. Balhara, Y.P., Kattula, D., Singh, S., Chukkali, S., & Bhargava, R. (2020). Impact of lockdown following COVID-19 on the gaming behavior of college students. Indian Journal of Public Health 64, Suppl S2, 172-176.

3. Lapaire, J.-R., & Masse, J. (2008). Danser la grammaire de l’anglais [Dancing English Grammar]. In J. Aden (Ed.) Apprentissages des langues et pratiques artistiques [Language learning through artistic practice] (pp.149-176). Éditions le Manuscrit.

4. Mandryk, R. L. (2014). BrainHex: A Neurobiological Gamer Typology Survey. Entertainment computing, 5(1), 55–62.

5. Marchand, A., & Hennig-Thurau, T. (2013). Value Creation in the Video Game Industry: Industry Economics, Consumer Benefits, and Research Opportunities. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 27(3), 141-157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2013.05.001

6. Plaisant, O., Courtois, R., Réveillère, C., Mendelsohn, G. A., & John, O. P. (2010). Validation par analyse factorielle du Big Five Inventory français (BFI-Fr). Analyse convergente avec le NEO-PI-R [Validation by factor analysis of French Big Five Inventory (BFI-Fr). Convergent analysis with NEO-PI-R] . Annales médico-psychologiques, 168, 97-106.