Innovation in Language Learning

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has stressed the importance of teaching grammar through the study of the cultures in which a language is spoken and written [1]. Video games and immersive environments are uniquely well suited to achieve this goal [2] [3] [4], but the potential of CLIL to teach dead languages is still vastly underexplored. To that end, this paper explores one learning module of Brendan’s Voyage, an online video game designed to teach medieval French language through a series of learning activities that immerse the player within culturally significant tales from the twelfth century in which the target language evolved. In development with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brendan’s Voyage offers a scalable model for other teachers of dead languages and past cultures who look to revolutionize their pedagogies through modern language learning, acquisition, and teaching paradigms.

We will specifically discuss Module 3 of Brendan’s Voyage, which aims to teach players how to recognize, conjugate, and use three key present tense verbs in medieval French. Rather than teaching this vocabulary through an explicit grammar approach, the module teaches these key linguistic skills through a series of games that take place in a medieval marketplace associated with the French-speaking court of Henry I. Through these tasks, the player is exposed to the multilingual environment of a twelfth century marketplace. From the opening moments of the module, the player is greeted by other characters in a range of languages that would have been represented in this polylingual environment (e.g. Catalan, Dutch, medieval French). As the player goes on to learn fundamental verb forms in medieval French, the player is simultaneously interacting with a historically informed cultural environment designed to highlight the multilingualism of medieval commerce and the ways in which such multilingualism promoted the exchange of storytelling traditions.

As this module demonstrates, Brendan’s Voyage realizes the animating goal of CLIL by teaching a “dead” language in an immersive cultural environment that actively conveys cultural content. Since it is impossible to travel to the past for immersive language study, Brendan’s Voyage conveys cultural content and linguistics study through games that allow the player to inhabit a range of environments, speak with characters of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and hear the target language spoken in locations modelled on historical reconstruction, with an expected increase in motivation to learn these subjects [5]. We therefore position Brendan’s Voyage as a novel application of CLIL theory with an added focus on offering immersive language learning for dead languages.