Using Community of Inquiry to Scaffold Language Learning in Out-of-School Gaming: A Case Study

Introduction

Digital games, with their growing popularity and prevalence in people’s everyday life, have received considerable scholarly attention for their educational value and pedagogical potential. In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), researchers have investigated the affordances of digital games for language learning and studies have produced promising results suggesting their positive effects on language learning, ranging from lowering affective filters (Grimshaw & Cardoso, 2018; Papasteriou, 2009; Reinders & Wattana, 2014; Wehner, Gump, & Downey, 2011), to facilitating collaborative interaction and learning (Peterson, 2012a, 2012b; Reinders & Wattana, 2014), learner participation (Deutschmann, Panichi, & Molka-Danielsen, 2009; Peterson, 2010) and language socialization (Lee & Gerber, 2013; Rama et al., 2012).

Influenced by these research findings that justify the use of digital games for language learning, some language educators set out to introduce digital games into the classroom, in most cases, by adopting a task-based approach (Chen & Yang, 2013; Hitosugi et al. 2014; Ranalli, 2008; Vasileiadou & Makrina, 2017). Following another line of research, however, researchers turn to digital games for their relevance to informal and out-of-school learning. The bulk of the existing studies in this strand approached out-of-class game-based learning (GBL) from the perspectives of game’s affordances (Marsh &Tainio, 2009; Thorne, Black, & Sykes, 2009), incidental learning outcomes (Jensen, 2017; Scholz & Schulze, 2017; Sundqvist, 2019; Sylvén & Sundqvist, 2012), as well as learner autonomy (Chick, 2011, 2012, 2014), focusing mainly upon the naturalist gameplay or gaming “in the wild” (Sundqvist, 2019), that is, gameplay removed from the classroom and taking place in the absence of instructional support and intervention. However, little is known about how to harness the potential of out-of-school gaming to facilitate language learning. In other words, the existing research offers little insight into what kinds of scaffolds need to be put in place so as to support students’ out-of-school game-based learning in order to optimize the learning outcomes and learning experience.

With these points in mind, this study draws upon the framework of community of inquiry to conduct a case study on providing learning support for out-of-school GBL. The purpose is to explore how out-of-school gaming can be supported so as to assure actual learning can take place, with a primary focus on the students’ perception, learning experience, and learning outcomes. This paper will first review previous studies on digital games and their adoption in out-of-class learning, after which the concept of community of inquiry will be introduced to frame and inform the research design of the current study. This is followed by a detailed account of the case study involving 11 intermediate EFL learners. The paper concludes by discussing the limitations and highlighting future research directions.