A Tale of Two Educational Games

A couple of years ago, I spent a summer teaching English in Ankara, Turkey. When I arrived, I could say two things in Turkish: “Hello,” and “Is there any bread?” I had brought a couple of English-language books with me, but eventually, I finished them, and greetings-and-baked-goods-based literature was in low supply. During my irregular skype calls home, I noticed that I was having trouble finding English words other than the simple vocabulary I used with my students. I worried that I was going to lose my English. So I was happy to discover “Word Bubbles,” an online video game which promised to increase my vocabulary.

The game works as follows: you are given a string of three letters, and you have one minute to come up with as many English words as you can that start with that string. I played it for a while, sometimes alone, sometimes with a student to test her English-word-generating speed. After a while, though, I realized that it was doing absolutely nothing for my vocabulary. The more you play it, the faster you get at coming up with the same words, but you never learn any new ones. If, instead, at the end of each round, a few new words were shown, you might actually learn something. As it is, “Word Bubbles” is the perfect example of a purportedly educational game which teaches you absolutely nothing.

On the other hand, “Lyrics Training” is a fun educational game that I've been recommending non-stop for the past two years. On the Lyrics Training website, there are a ridiculous number of music videos in different languages. You play the music video, and the lyrics appear underneath, but with words missing. You have to fill in the blanks to get the music video to proceed. Depending on how difficult you want to make it, you can set it so 10% of the words are missing, 25% are missing, or everything is blank. As of today, there are music videos in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch. You can search by artist or song title, or just by genre or difficulty level. People load new videos every day, so there is always new stuff to try.

Unfortunately, I've found it difficult to use it in a classroom setting. If the students are at very different levels of English (or German, Spanish, etc) comprehension, then either only a couple of them will participate, or the ones with more advanced language skills will get bored while waiting for the beginners to figure a word out. However, it could be a great activity for a single student, or a group of four or fewer, if they finish an activity more than five minutes before the rest of the class. It's also something I recommend to a lot of my students to keep up with their English over the summer. Because there are a lot of popular songs on the site, it's something the students really enjoy, so unlike a lot of optional assignments, they actually do it.

It's a great game because you can read the lyrics along with the video, so you can pick up words you might otherwise have missed. Since they're written out, they're very easy to look up in a dictionary. You can play the same song as many times as you want, until you have memorized it. Memorizing songs is wonderful, because you remember words and grammatical structures much easier when they're in context. You also get to hear different accents, comparing a Spanish singer's pronunciation with that of a Mexican singer. One word of warning, though: You will almost certainly get some of the songs stuck in your head!