Halo: Reach - Fails of the Weak Volume 24 (Funny H

Coastline Community College Leads the Way with Gaming Scenarios and Second Language AcquisitionOne of the greatest barriers to second language acquisition is "conversational anxiety." Conversational anxiety is the nervousness which overwhelms a speaker as they attempt to conduct conversation in a new language. This nervousness, in layman's terms "the fear of messing up," can act as a barrier to a student's ability to truly feel comfortable enough with a new language to process it, internalize it, and successfully construct it freely into meaningful conversation.Coastline Community College is leading the way in overcoming these barriers to learning through interactive gaming technology. Gaming programmers at the campus have been working with Arabic instructors (Coastline will be launching an online Arabic course to the military in Fall 2007) to create a virtual Arabic Village.Students moving freely through a virtual Arabic Village and communicating with residents and soldiers at a checkpoint is among many scenarios being created. In this Arabic Village, a student can assume the role of either a male or female character, referred to as an Avatar, and move freely throughout the village. Valuable dialogue exchanges are programmed into the game, such as conversing with guards at a checkpoint, searching for the home of a local citizen, and making a purchase from vendors. Through the use of voice recognition software, a student "play-learning" through the game is able to determine the outcome of the game. This "real time" exchange is anxiety free, thereby bypassing conversational anxiety barriers and enhancing actual dialogue comprehension