Forms of participation and semiotic mediation in board games for second language learning

Abstract

This article discusses a study on how language use and language development can be promoted through engaging students in different participation roles in board games. Theoretically, the study is grounded in sociocultural perspectives of activity theory and the role of play as a form of human motivation. A group of Grade 4 primary students learning English as a second language in Hong Kong participated in the games, with alternating roles as players and facilitators. Students’ discursive and embodied participation in the games was analysed to reveal how changing participation roles constitute a form of social-relational mediation that motivates students’ deployment of different interaction practices and multimodal semiotic resources to achieve context-sensitive, object-related and goal-directed actions in collaborative group activities. The data also show students’ agency and self-regulation when they enacted the same participation role with different subject positions and semiotic resources. This article concludes by calling for more attention to how engaged participation resulting in situated purposeful language use can be promoted through different forms of participation in social activities such as board games.

Keywords:

• multimodal semiotic mediation
• forms of participation
• board-gaming and second language learning

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Angel Lin, Dr Dave Carless, Dr Greg Myers, Dr Fiona Hyland and Professor Jim Tollefson for commenting on earlier versions of this article. I particularly thank the reviewers and the editors of this journal for their insightful suggestions for further improvements. Any remaining limitations are all mine.

Notes

1. 1. The Three Character Classic was written in the thirteenth century with a view to teaching young children Confucian philosophy. The whole text contains triplets of characters.

2. 2. Game facilitators are experienced players of a particular game who will introduce the game to novice players through step-by-step explanations and actual playing.

3. 3. Wertsch (1998) asserted that “materiality is a property of any mediational means” (p. 31, italics in original). This quality is easy to understand with artefacts such as books, maps and computers, but with more abstract or less tangible mediational means such as spoken language, Wertsch (1998) explained that the acoustic sign vehicles constitute the materiality despite the fact that they tend to exist only in fleeting moments.

4. 4. “Pain colour” is originally called “misery colour” in the game rubrics. Players choose their own misery colour at the beginning of each trick, and they should avoid misery colour cards as they would score negative points according to the numerical value on the misery colour cards. The game facilitator changed “misery” to “pain” out of the belief that most students may be familiar with “pain” but not “misery”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jasmine C.M. Luk

Jasmine Luk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. degree at the Lancaster University, the United Kingdom. Her research expertise is related to discourse studies in second language education from sociocultural and critical perspectives. Apart from being the first author of the book Classroom Interactions as Cross-Cultural Encounters, she has published several book chapters and articles in journals including Issues in Applied Linguistics, System, Language Assessment Quarterly, Language, Culture and Curriculum and International Journal of Multilingualism.