Tips on useful games for teaching english?

[Ashadow700]

So this might be a bit different.
I've been employed as an english tutor by a chinese family, and it's going to be my job to teach their 8 year old son spoken english. I figured it could be an idea to try and integrate some video games into the teaching process as those should be both fun for the kid and give me a lot of material to work with.

Therefor I wanted to ask if you can think of any games that I could play together with the kid. The need to be the kind of games that anyone can pick up and play right away since I don't think he has any experience with games, they obviously must have very easy, spoken english and I need to be able to run them on my PC since I did not bring with any game console or anything to China.


So... does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Euryalus]

The pick up and play bit is a bit difficult... psychonauts maybe?

It's a 3D platformer with fully voiced dialouge... It's not super simple linguistically but it might at least help with picking up pronunciation?

 

[mistahzig1]

I'd go with a talking Lego game (Marvel Super Heroes, Batman 2, Lego Movie).

I think you can add subtitles as an option.

When there is dialogue, pause the game, ask the child to translate what he heard.

Thses games have puzzles also and an 8 year old will struggle sometimes. That's where you can talk to him in English about what he should do.

"Switch to Big Character (mime being big?). Lift car (vroom vroom)"


You know... stuff like that.

 

[pilouuuu]

Lucasarts classic games worked a lot for teaching English myself.
Try Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle.

Bookworm Adventure is great for practicing vocabulary.

 

[omega 616]

Is there a "typing of the dead" that is more kid friendly than killing zombies?

Trine games might be good, it's basically a fairy tale with puzzles and pretty as fuck. Just get the kid to translate and then he complete the next section of game as a little reward ... Carrot and stick method of teaching.

 

[Wasted]

I was just thinking about Final Fantasy IX and how it helped me develop my reading skills as a kid, since those old school JRPGs have a book's worth of reading in them. Although IX never came out for the PC, VII and VIII did.

If you like Psychonaughts and Tim Shafer I recommend Costume Quest. It's a simple JRPG style game available on Steam. No voice-acting but a simple and fun plot that a young child should be able to read.

 

[skurz]

The Lego Games would work really well.
To name a few, there's Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel Super Heroes, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the newest Lego Movie Game in addition to The Hobbit coming out eventually. If the child is familiar with one of those movies in his native language, it would be a bit easier to follow and pick up English by playing the related game.

The games have local co-op, so you could do a sort of "follow the leader" through the game as you help him translate what's going on. The only problem is that he might enjoy playing more than learning.

 

[VanQ]

I learned a lot of Japanese from playing the Pokemon games in their original Japanese form. I reckon it would be just as good for teaching English. I recommend digging out your old DS/GameBoy or finding a decent emulator if you don't have one and a Japanese copy of whichever Pokemon game you fancy, I'd recommend some of the earlier ones since they were the simplest, and letting him play those.

Fun and free.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

I'd go with a talking Lego game (Marvel Super Heroes, Batman 2, Lego Movie).

I think you can add subtitles as an option.

When there is dialogue, pause the game, ask the child to translate what he heard.

Thses games have puzzles also and an 8 year old will struggle sometimes. That's where you can talk to him in English about what he should do.

"Switch to Big Character (mime being big?). Lift car (vroom vroom)"


You know... stuff like that.

this is a good suggestion, unfortunately most games typically assume you have a foundation of whatever language it is already in place, so trying to just hear/learn it on the fly is incredibly difficult, but the lego games are a good place to start.

 

[Pink Gregory]

If you like Psychonaughts and Tim Shafer I recommend Costume Quest. It's a simple JRPG style game available on Steam. No voice-acting but a simple and fun plot that a young child should be able to read.

Ditto on Stacking.

Simple puzzle game that's engaging with a unique aesthetic; but dialogue is mostly written.

 

[Dansen]

Take an rts and switch the language to whatever you are trying to learn. I learned a ton of spanish playing Age of empires 2 in the laguage.

 

[L. Declis]

My god, did no one else really think of this?

SCRIBBLENAUTS!

You know, a video game where language mastery determines fun, and you'll learn some interesting vocabulary, like C'thulu. I've used it in classes to great effect.

Secondly, and it's not necessarily a video game, but Harry Potter if read together can be great (if you're one on one, which makes it easier to plan lessons).

Third thing: the best videogame to learn English is.... any videogame. Trust me, your best solution is to just get your students to play anything they like, and you will use THAT as your instrument. Your student likes fighting games? Explain him what each English-speaking character says in Tekken or Street Fighter, and use that to casually mention grammar rules. Your student likes FPS? Again, teach him what the characters say, and convince him to play some single player to hear some dialogue. Your student likes rpg? Then you're darn lucky as there's nothing better than a story-driven game that's entirely in English for an exercise.

^This.

Also, if you use Baidu, you can probably find most TV programs in English, but with English and Chinese subtitles. Pick one he may like, and go from there. He probably has a phone (He's in China, after all), so make sure he has a good translation app and impress that he should look up words he doesn't know.

I could give more advice, but I need to know what level he is, and so on.

 

[Liquidprid3]

I second Scribblenauts. Also, I think Pokémon might be a good example. The games aren't too difficult, and the story is simple enough to understand. It's might be a little biased of me, but aj still think they would be decent at teaching.

 

[Black Reaper]

I don't know how well it might work for you, but as far as i remember, i learned English by playing Zelda OoT with my mother
Downside is, it's not voiced

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

It's not a videogame, but what about boggle? Or I guess you could do facebook games like words with friends (there's one that knocks off Boggle, too, but I can't think of the name offhand). Simple word games where your students /have/ to exercise their English vocabularies. Granted, it only really works if there's another English learner you can pair your student up with, but it's a thought.

Beyond that, as a teacher myself (though Social Studies, not any branch of Language Arts), I agree with Zira:

English teacher here. Here's my opinion.

First thing: there is NO proper "game to teach English". Chances are if it's a teaching game, it won't be perceived as a game but as an exercise.

Second thing: one of my students once showed me a game for Nintendo DS which taught English with minigames. It wasn't much (see point one above), but it was a good start.

Third thing: the best videogame to learn English is.... any videogame. Trust me, your best solution is to just get your students to play anything they like, and you will use THAT as your instrument. Your student likes fighting games? Explain him what each English-speaking character says in Tekken or Street Fighter, and use that to casually mention grammar rules. Your student likes FPS? Again, teach him what the characters say, and convince him to play some single player to hear some dialogue. Your student likes rpg? Then you're darn lucky as there's nothing better than a story-driven game that's entirely in English for an exercise.

The important thing is getting them exposed to the language. It will reinforce what they're learning, regardless of where it's coming from. You may even want to try to get them into watching cartoons or movies in English, maybe with the subtitles turned on. For example, I know just about enough Spanish to follow along with the subtitles for random Arnold Schwarzenegger movies that pop up on the Spansish channels around here, which is good because I like Arnie and apparently Latinos do, too[footnote]Seriously, the best action movie channel around here is uniMAS, for some bizzare reason. FX is the next best, but it doesn't really hold a candle, language barrier aside.[/footnote]. It's probably the one place where I've gotten the most chance to exercise my Spanish since I graduated high school.

 

[snowpuppy]

KotOR had a lot of reading for aliens. I found that it helped me when I was younger.

 

[Ferisar]

Guess what taught me English when I came to the U.S.:

Diablo 2 ************, do you speak it?

(Sorry)

But yeah, to parrot what has been said, I think there's no good game to start learning English outside of what wants to be a teaching game. The problem with those games is that is 99.9% they're not perceived as games. If you can reasonable allow the usage of any game the kid likes in which English is a spoken language, it's a start. The other side is obviously having ways to reinforce learning and have other means to access the language. Games are fun and all, but the way they teach isn't always straightforward. I'm sure you know all of this, I just think that fixating on using a game can create an oversight of other learning activities.

Also stay in school don't do drugs.