If you would like to learn more about aikido, come to a free demo at the Alamance County Community YMCA on 17 May at 7 PM. If you can’t come to the demo, then please contact Dr. David Neville (dneville@elon.edu) or Pam Duckworth (pduckworth@acymca.org) to express your interest in a class that is now forming. You can also visit the Aikido of Alamance website for more information and aikido videos.

Published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, The Language Educator provides educators of all languages at all levels with comprehensive coverage of important trends and developments in foreign language education.

In his article, Neville describes how new and emerging technologies hold the potential of making the study of a second language and culture more accessible to a wider range of interested students and will facilitate collaboration between colleagues in diverse academic fields. He also proposes that the creation of open educational resources with these technologies will help to bring teaching practice and research closer together and will also formulate new instructional best practices in second language and culture acquisition.

During the presentation, Post and Neville described the unique affordances that the technology provides second language instructors, situated their presentation within the framework of current sociocultural theories of second language acquisition, and articulated best classroom practices and learning activities that make use of the technology.

In addition, Post described her use of webcams as a means of supporter her work with the Amigos Club, a joint venture between Spanish conversation students at 黑料不打烊 and Hispanic students in English as a Second Language (ESL) courses in Alamance Burlington School Systems. The round table session was attended by second language instructors from around the country.

THATCamps, short for “The Humanities and Technology Camps,” are free and open “unconferences” where humanists and technologists meet to discuss how current and emerging digital technologies can be leveraged to teach and increase access to the humanities.

The flagship journal of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Foreign Language Annals is dedicated to the advancement of language teaching and learning, and seeks to serve the professional interests of classroom instructors, researchers, and administrators concerned with the learning and teaching of languages at all levels of instruction.

In his article, Neville examines the shared characteristics of narrative within theories of situated cognition, sociocultural approaches to second language acquisition, and video game studies as a means of developing meaningful, engaging, and instructional gameplay in 3D digital game-based learning (3D-DGBL) environments. He asserts that carefully-designed 3D-DGBL environments have a place in the second language classroom because they are able to simulate real-world sociocultural spaces, allow playful and non-threatening interaction with these spaces, and permit player/learners to experiment with questions of personal identity within a framework of shifting subjectivities. Neville concludes that, on account of these instructional affordances, 3D-DGBL is a promising and engaging learning platform that allows students to develop sophisticated mental schemata for handling context-specific challenges requiring them to apply knowledge of a second language and culture toward the solution of specific real-world problems.

David Neville, assistant professor of German and director of language learning technologies at 黑料不打烊, 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.

黑料不打烊 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 黑料不打烊, 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.

A large number of students in the Department of Foreign Languages go abroad each year to experience foreign cultures and improve their facility with a foreign language. If you will be going abroad in January 2010 or for a bit longer, we want to document and share your experiences! Please consider submitting a photo you make during your study abroad experience to the Department of Foreign Languages / Language Media Center photo contest. The theme of this year’s contest is: “黑料不打烊 Foreign Languages Abroad!”

This is what you need to do:

1. Take a photo of yourself, wearing some form of 黑料不打烊 attire, engaged in a cultural activity or visiting a cultural site in the foreign country you will be visiting.
2. Submit this photo in digital format (either on CD or as an email attachment) by February 20, 2010, to assistant professor David Neville (dneville@elon.edu)
3. Also submit a brief paragraph (~150 words) explaining what you are doing in the photo, what you have learned on your study abroad, and how you used your foreign language.

Photos will be evaluated by a committee of faculty and students based on image quality, cultural interest, and thematic relevance. Winning photos will be prominently displayed for one year in the Language Media Center (2nd floor in Carlton). Please note that submitted photos should have a sufficiently large pixel-count to permit enlargement.

Please contact David Neville (dneville@elon.edu) if you have any questions regarding the photo contest.

In his article, Neville describes the various technologies (text, 2D, and 3D) available for language educators to create digital game-based learning environments that may be used for teaching second languages. In addition to providing an overview of these technologies, Neville also highlights the interdisciplinary work done at 黑料不打烊 to create a 3D game for teaching the German language and culture.

David Neville, assistant professor of German and director of language learning technologies, presented a paper, “A digital game-based learning approach to developing situated cultural competency,” at the recent American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Conference, held Nov. 20-22 in San Diego.

The paper was framed as conceptual analysis from an instructional design perspective and explored the feasibility of using three-dimensional digital game-based learning (3D-DGBL) environments to assist in second language acquisition (SLA). By examining the shared characteristics of narrative within theories of situated cognition, context-based approaches to SLA, and game studies the paper suggested ways for developing meaningful, engaging, and instructional gameplay in 3D-DGBL environments for SLA.

Neville also presented a poster at the conference, “Getting game: Digital game-based learning for second language acquisition.” The poster highlighted the work that an interdisciplinary student team from German, digital art and computer sciences at 黑料不打烊 did on a 3D-DGBL environment for teaching beginning university German.

The journal is an international, interdisciplinary volume that leads the field in its dedication to all matters associated with the use of computers in language learning (L1 and L2), teaching, and testing.

In the article, Neville and co-authors Brett Shelton, assistant professor of instructional technology and learning sciences at Utah State University, and Brian McInnis, assistant professor of German at the University of Northern Iowa, report on a mixed-methods study using an interactive fiction (IF) game to teach German vocabulary, reading, and culture to university students. The study measured knowledge retention and transfer, and evaluated the attitudes of students toward the game. The results tentatively indicate that contextualized, immersive role-play may have helped students to learn. Nevertheless, most students were apprehensive about the game as a learning platform given the departure from traditional instruction. The authors also used the article to discuss new research findings related to the software design and development process and student involvement in this process.