Language Learning Games vs. Glorified Flashcards

Anyone who is familiar with my research is probably aware of the fact that I tend to be very critical of what I call "glorified flashcards" (GFs). I use this term to refer to language learning digital "games" that are basically fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice questions slapped into a basic electronic gaming environment. Often these take the form of Jeopardy-type games.

However, I thought that I should point out that though I am critical of using GFs as language learning serious "games", I do believe that they can be very useful! In fact, I use them quite frequently. I just don't think that they should be considered as serious language learning "games". Instead, they are glorified flashcards. They are tools that allow language learners to quickly practice specific language elements within a prepared electronic environment. But they are not really "games".

When I use GFs I tend to create them myself because I am very particular about the content and format that I like to have them use. For example, in a GF* that I created you can review any of the vocabulary from any of the chapters from any of the textbooks used for beginning and intermediate Spanish language courses at the University of Texas at Austin. In this case, I designed the GF to be as useful as possible for students in these courses because they can choose which chapter vocabulary lists they would like to practice. Moreover I created this game as a multiplayer game which makes it particularly useful (I've found) as an in-class review activity because you can pit groups of students against each other. And believe me, they can really get into it!

My most recent GF* is designed using the same framework (a multiplayer game that generates random questions based on content specified by the user.) In this new GF what I've done though is focused on verb conjugations instead of vocabulary identification. Players can choose which verb conjugations they would like to practice, and how large they would like the game to be, and the questions are randomly generated accordingly. Instead of basing the verbs used on any given textbook though, I have instead based them on Mark Davies' Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. That is, I took all the verbs (there are 1083) that appeared within the top 5000 most frequent words in Spanish. I also pulled their conjugations directly from the Royal Academy's website instead of creating a script to generate them automatically (I did this because a lot of them were irregular).

In my opinion (which is obviously biased, so feel free to share your own opinion below), I think that these GFs are on par with, or better than, most language learning "games" already out there. But they're still not really games. They're just competitive flashcards online. I do plan to continue developing more real language learning games, but these will be much more like the game* that I created for my dissertation. I hope that we can see many more such games be created, and I hope that they can be used effectively alongside the much more common GFs.

*Not currently available.