Recently on the Pen & Paper Games forum, someone mentioned he or she was teaching English to some Japanese students using a simple custom board game and asked about the possibility of using an RPG to do the same, without it seeming "too linear". I find these kinds of topics really interesting, so I replied - I hope it was helpful, and would welcome any thoughts on the topic by readers here.
I can understand you mean you don't want it to be railroady, but
teaching people a language through the medium of gaming has different
rules (in my opinion) because like math is a universal language, so too
is is physics and the law of cause-and-effect, inertia and sequence.
You WANT situations and solutions to be linear to a great extent, I
would think, so they can associate what they know as the phrases and
concepts and words in their language for some actions, to be easily
understood and readily identifiable by their analogues in the language
being taught, so they'll know that the "cut the rope" action in English
has the same effect on the suspended weight to open the door, that they
would intuitively know as the phrase and action for their language.
You want to firmly establish similarity and counterparts to give them a
definite grounding in the basics that will make them feel confident and
excited to try to come up with and discover and learn new things and
concepts and ideas, language-wise - advanced phrasing to escalate their
progress, so they can be proud to know they've moved from "stand on log"
to reach a shelf to "fill bottle with rocks" to get water, deepening
the complexity of actions and relations of objects and situations, and
easing into things naturally.
I'd recommend looking into the concepts of "token parsing" used now in
many games but most notably in early text adventure games like Zork,
that delved into the idea of verb-object examination and conjugation,
with one example coming to mind, "The phrase 'put on fur coat' means
something entirely different than 'put fur on coat', which we'd rather
not guess at". There were some really good magazine articles of the
times, and a "How to write computer adventure games" book (metal spiral
bound) that insightfully considered varying complexity from the simple
"verb object" (take sword) to "tell Joe to get the gun and follow me"
and how to program the game to interpret that natural language structure
that Westerners would intuitively type.
There are "skill challenges" as I understand it, for D&D and
Pathfinder that relate to specific skills or abilities that are needed
to be used to overcome obstacles, that could help slowly expand
understanding of new terms or references, within a limited scope that
you as the instructor choose, mostly puzzle-solving but with set
criteria, like the group must generate 5 successes in 10 turns before
the stone guardian arrives - somewhere in the RPG books, the rules and
such for these are buried but I don't play d20 so I'm afraid I can't be
more specific.
Simple one or two-scene scenarios, like very short role-playing game
sessions, could also work, probably a single main challenge that all the
players/students could contribute to, and then a few other smaller ones
that individuals or smaller groups could break up into, to solve.
Relating to a very simple exercise in imagination which might also be
useful in your purposes, I wrote an article for Strolen's Citadel about a
creative visualization exercise that probably a lot of gamers have
never done:
http://strolen.com/viewing/Imagi...Imagi...whut
My 7th grade science teacher did an exercise for the whole class to just
close their eyes and imagine they were an animal and a storm was
rolling in, and imagine what they would do, where they would go, and
then she asked a few people to name the animal and describe its size and
movements, which seems like would be a really good exercise in working
on the familiar basics your students are learning, in an imaginative
way.
Lastly there is a free game called Wushu Open (also a commercial
version) by Dan Bayn that you might be able to modify for your uses,
that relies on success rolls in the game being informed by how many
details/embellishments a player adds to their actions, so "I hit the
guy" or "I jump the pit" gives you one die to roll, but "I run forward
and leap at the guy, spinning in mid-air with a kick to his chest" or "I
take a few steps back and sprint forward, yelling as I spring over the
chasm" gives you maybe 4 dice to roll.
http://danielbayn.com/wushu/
