Video Games and Languages - Players Choose Their Experience/Difficulty & TPRS, Part 1

Comparing my language teaching alongside TPRS and achieving highly engaging language learning in the class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GooIKQs6SlY 

In this video, Adam Millard talks about Spelunky 2 and how it allows players to choose their difficulty in-game which in essence allows them to choose their own experience. While the player is playing a game, they can have the desire to increase the difficulty as they play it by making in-game choices or going to a menu to tweak some settings. He calls this granular difficulty. Formerly, games had fixed difficulty levels that players choose in the beginning which simplifies and locks the option of the setting the difficulty levels for the rest of the game. Nowadays, to try to appeal to more players with different ranges of experience and skill, having optional difficult tasks dotted around the game world, the players can choose to put themselves into a harder challenge or just say on the story-driven path.

In TPRS, the teacher must cater to all the students, therefore, usually the slowest processing student becomes the bar of how fast the class operates. However, when there are fewer students, the magic of TPRS can incorporate a customizable difficulty level according to the players' desires.
    The user interface of language classes are through speaking and how adept the players/students are at speaking these sentences and using the structures. The "game stage" of the TPRS class is represented by the structure or the word that we are concentrating on. 

First-Level Difficulty - Forming Answers, Regurgitation

In beginners classes, we would concentrate on sentences with "be/have/want". So let's say the teacher starts with a thread of the story "George wants a Coke." The difficulty for normal to more beginning students would be the challenge of forming the sentence and answering these questions in order of difficulty:

1) Does George have a Coke?
2) Does George have a Coke or a Pepsi?
3) Does George have a Pepsi?
4) What does George have?

From easy (#1) to hard (#4), these are questions because in listening or context, each gets more abstract or varies from the original story thread a bit more. The following are the answers the students are given or expected to give in the very beginning.

1) Yes, George has a Coke. (The student confirms the story with the question says yes and repeats the sentence)
2) George has a Coke. (The student confirms with the question and chooses one of the options and says the sentence).
3) No, George doesn't have a Pepsi. George has a Coke. (The student confirms with the question, negates presented question's position, forms a different negation structure, and takes out the answer and forms the sentence.)
4) George has a Coke. (The student analyzes the question, remembers the story, takes out the answer, and forms the sentence.)

Bigger Stages

You could break down each number into it's own difficulty but in a larger picture, each one of these is a first-level difficulty of the student. We are also adding the different conjugations in English from first person perspective (I have) and second person perspective (you have), but this stays within the first level. The main thing to play around here is memory of the story, exposure of the verb alongside interesting contexts. The next stage here would be for the teacher to elicit details from the students, thus adding more to the story.

Second-Level Difficulty - Adding Parallel Characters to the Story

George has a Coke... ok. Let's try adding some other people to that. We are modifying the story which adds threads to the story but it doesn't change what kinds of structures or words we have to use.

"There is a girl. Martha is the girl. Does Martha have a Coke?" (Note, the expressions "there is" and "is" are previously learned structures)

And the teacher might elicit a student's response and say "No, Martha has a Pepsi." So the thread is "Martha has a Pepsi." And from there we now have more story, but with the exact same structure to practice. Does Martha have a Coke? "No, Martha doesn't have a Coke. She has a Pepsi." 

And then we can add more characters: "Fred has a Sprite." 

Other characters can be added, but in my experience, it seems like three is a good number to play around with when it comes to simple structures and beginning level students. Usually around two to three characters are dealt a story and we expand within those stories. We also add details as we see in the next section.

Third-Level Difficulty - Adding Details 

Adding details usually means playing with other language structures other than the bare basic simple form of the language in the previous two difficulties. Languages structures will add to the variety as much as adding new vocabulary will as well. However, the number of language structures in each language are finite and therefore a more reasonable tool to present to the student. We can add things such as:

George has two Cokes.

George has a Coke for dogs.

George had a Coke. Right now, George does not have a Coke. 

Each sentence adds a little detail but still stays within the "stage" of the class. Blaine calls this "staying in bounds" because the main goal is to keep on practicing the verb in its many different contexts and iterations. 

We can keep adding more levels but there are some questions I would like pose for myself to ponder that also come from seeing Adam Millard's video and game design.

1) How do we craft a level and prepare ourselves as teachers for teaching a class? What is the "level" the students will explore and play around with (experiment and/or explore)? 

2) How do we set those expectations that a student player is supposed to find the story and/or make the story with in the class? This is the same question as how do you get them to participate actively?

3) How do we add more levels or increase the difficulty and how do we craft that into our "level"?

4) When exactly do we know the student desires to increase the difficulty level? Should we go to a higher difficulty even if we believe it's too hard for the student? What if the desire for a challenge surpasses what we expect a student's level should be as teachers?

5) How do we make it meaningful for the student?