Designing e-Learning Games on Cellphones to Promote Language Learning and Literacy in the Developing World

摘要

Literacy is one of the great challenges in the developing world. Even more challenging is thetension between regional and ???world??? languages ??? that economic opportunities are often closedto those who are literate only in a regional language. India for instance is a country with 22regional and two ???national languages??? Hindi and English. But for most practical purposes,English is the language of economic opportunity. It is the language of instruction in privateschools and all universities, a large fraction of business and government, and the language whichis driving India???s service economy ??? the fastest growing in the world. Fluency in English canalmost be equated with membership in the middle and upper classes [6]. The value of English iswidely recognized by ordinary Indians [15], and it is the poorest citizens who are lobbying moststrongly to expand English teaching. A recent article states that mastery of English is the ???singlemost influential factor that determines access to elite educational institutions, and hence toimportant avenues of economic and social advancement??? [9].More broadly, the literature [e.g. 6], our conversations with development professionals in Africa,Latin America, and Asia, and further experiences in the field indicate that a large proportion oflow-income people want to improve their command of an appropriate ???world language.??? Englishis certainly one of these, as is Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. But even in countries where such alanguage is an official ???national language,??? many speakers (inevitably the least empowered)have a different native language, and many regional languages (let alone dialects) are oftenspoken. In India, Hindi and English are official ???national languages,??? but Hindi is native to only20% of the population. ???World language??? fluency opens the door to further education, a largerregional (or world) marketplace, to ???new economy??? outsourced jobs, and often improves accessto government, health and legal services.Our current work concentrates on ESL (English as a Second Language), but we believe many ofthe lessons will transfer to other ???WSL??? (World language) learning challenges. Unfortunately,formal English teaching in public schools is not succeeding, and it is far out of reach to the largenumbers of children who are not able to attend school regularly. From the literature [e.g. 1] andour fieldwork in the poorest state of India, two significant factors stand out: irregular schoolattendance owing to the need for students to work in fields, homes, etc., and the preparation oflocal teachers, who themselves have very poor training in English. Regional schools typicallyhave no ???English teacher,??? rather a handful of teachers who cover everything. In our 3 years offieldwork, we have usually been unable to communicate with local teachers in English and haverelied on interpreters.At the same time, high technology ??? in the form of cellphones ??? are being used by Indians at alleconomic levels. India is the largest market for cellphones worldwide, and the majority are nowbeing bought by illiterate and semi-literate users. And a growing percentage of these phonesfeature advanced multimedia capabilities for photos and gaming. We argue that these devices area perfect vehicle for new kinds of informal (out-of-school) language learning. All these factorscreate an extraordinary opportunity: to dramatically expand English skills in young Indians,which is the fastest way to open the doors for employment and further education. While ourPAPER ABSTRACT ??? iConference 2008work can be integrated with, and can complement the school English curriculum, the greatestopportunity is in out-of-school learning. The Indian children we studied, even those with workcommitments for the family, spent an hour or so daily playing with friends, and several hourswatching television.We believe that ESL learning games on cellphones can address the above challenges. Gameshave well-known ???immersive??? properties ??? that is, the learner experiences themselves as being???inside??? the game. Games continually challenge players to develop new skills, and reward theiracquisition. Players often spend long hours in games which allows them to develop advancedskills. Games can be social experiences which encourage communication with other players. Andfinally, games can be designed to mirror the real-world games that children play, providing themwith tools and encouragement to use English recreationally outside the electronic game.Leveraging e-learning games for education in developing regions is not far-fetched. At least twonon-government organizations, Pratham and the Azim Premji Foundation, have used computergames in their initiatives for children in the urban slums and rural areas of India respectively.Most importantly, a large-scale evaluation by Pratham1 showed significant gains on mathematicstest scores from playing computer games that target math learning [2]. It is plausible that similarlearning outcomes can be replicated using mobile games for ESL.In this paper, I introduce my dissertation work, which is now in its 4th year. It is informed by sixrounds of fieldwork over three years with children living in the urban slums and rural areas ofIndia. Our total time actually in the field is over six months. A goal of these field studies was tolearn first-hand about the everyday learning contexts of the above children as part of a broaderneeds assessment. Another objective was to examine the feasibility of our ideas for technologyassistedlearning, by piloting off-the-shelf software and early designs of our mobile applicationson a very small scale with children from the urban slums and villages. Building on the systemsrequirements that we have learned iteratively from these studies, we are completing a final roundof design and prototyping in Fall 2007 in preparation for a year-long deployment in 2008.Rural children displaying ???You win!??? screens from two cellphone games that we have designed. Success in thesegames, and mastery of the technology, was a considerable incentive and source of pride for these children. Thesekinds of behaviors were repeated over and over.1 A longitudinal randomized experiment over more than two years with over 10,000 urban slums students.PAPER ABSTRACT ??? iConference 2008Since our previous findings are already published, I will only review those games that we havedesigned so far and their learning outcomes. Instead, in this paper, I want to focus on meta-issuesrelated to the project???s design methodology and its interdisciplinary nature. In particular, I wantto draw attention to the challenges of doing information systems research in this highly difficultdomain and offer strategies based on how I would undertake a project in this domain differentlyif I had to do it a second time.The rest of this paper addresses the following issues:??? What is an effective model for multidisciplinary collaboration? While the most conventionalapproach is to assemble a specialist from each domain to form a team, we have learned thatspecialists in their respective areas are not always able to relate to the unique problem thatlies at the intersection of these multiple areas of expertise. I have often found myself actingas the ???interpreter??? between computer programmers and curriculum developer in my team.More importantly, I will describe the theoretical frameworks that I drew upon from secondlanguage acquisition [3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 16] and game studies [8, 13, 14, 17], and how myknowledge of both areas (to a certain degree) in addition to human-centered design made itpossible for me to perform the essential ???conceptual footwork??? for integrating them in our elearninggame designs, even as I relied on our curriculum developer for her practicalexperience in teaching English in India.??? How can we develop competencies across disciplinary boundaries that make interdisciplinarywork possible? Here, I will trace my intellectual development from my initial schooling incomputer science and human-computer interaction to my realization that the problem I amconfronting in my dissertation actually belongs to the education domain, and my subsequentsocialization in the School of Education to learn their ???trade.?????? What are some appropriate approaches for conducting cross-cultural research in informationsystems? While ethnographic methods are critical for understanding the practices and beliefsof a community, culture is a dynamic phenomenon that changes quickly especially in the faceof rapid technology uptake (e.g. cellphones) in emerging regions. I will cite my experiencesfrom an international development project in Africa involving handheld technology to arguethat conducting feasibility studies with multiple user communities is necessary for revealingour cultural assumptions. In particular, I will support this claim by describing the differencesin how children in North and South India play our games differently.??? What data collection challenges are there with users in developing regions who lack theexposure to technology and literacy levels for them to articulate their thoughts meaningfullyso as to be directly useful for technology design? We have found that while it is difficult toobtain useful data from child users other than by observing them use the technology, we haveobtained useful feedback by showing our designs to highly educated, local informants whoknow these children well as caregivers or educators. Similarly, the mundane obstacles inconducting fieldwork with local communities with the help of interpreters offer clues toingrained beliefs and deeper patterns of behavior that affect technology use. I will describe afew of these behaviors that we have observed.