How SLU students are learning Italian by playing “Assassin’s Creed II”

Language instructors have long used film and fiction as teaching tools. But one Saint Louis University Italian professor takes that a step further, putting his students in situations where language mastery could mean life or death—at least in the virtual sense.

Simone Bregni, an associate professor of languages, literatures, and cultures at SLU, has been incorporating video games in his courses since 1997, but noticed their impact leveled up, so to speak, around 2009, when many quest-based games evolved into something akin to interactive movies. What’s more, games like Assassin’s Creed II, which is set in Renaissance-era Italy, also offered cultural and historical details that provided fodder for classroom discussions.

“In my research and teaching experiences, video games work because they are not just passive,” says Bregni, an avid gamer who credits video games with improving his foreign language skills over the years. “You’re right there. You’re sharing the action. You’re solving the mystery.”

Students’ positive progress helped inspire Bregni to develop a course that relied more heavily on gaming as a teaching tool. And, with a fellowship grant from SLU’s Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, he launched Intensive Italian for Gamers in the fall 2017 semester.

Though he’s only taught the course once so far, every student enrolled mastered the equivalent of two semesters of Italian. Plus, students who continued taking Italian the following semester continued to outpace their peers who’d taken more traditional courses.

“The general pedagogical idea behind the course I created was that a strong shared interest within a learning group fosters acquisition, comprehension, and learning in general,” Bregni says.

Essentially, the class was an affinity group whose members shared a passion for playing video games. This drove higher levels of collaboration within the class, which boosted performance.

“The other part of that was that each and every one of them found it fun to go back home and, on their computers or video game systems, continue playing in the language,” says Bregni, who added that one of his goals is to encourage students to become lifelong language learners.

Bregni also supplemented sessions using games in the target language with more traditional materials, including vocabulary worksheets, listening and reading comprehension exercises, and written and oral follow-up activities. Students were often asked to discuss and reflect on the gaming narrative in writing and to apply what they learned to their own life experience in a process the professor calls “identify, acquire, create”: identifying both familiar and unfamiliar vocabulary and structures, acquiring new knowledge through practice, and creating written texts and spoken discourse.

The professor is compiling those techniques and other insights gleaned from the gaming course into a textbook he’s writing with Elon University language professor Brandon Essary. Though the book will originally focus on Italian, its strategies can be adapted to other languages.

Bregni, who is currently on sabbatical, is also spending his time away from the classroom giving presentations at educational institutions and conferences in Europe and the United States, where he’s been encouraging teachers who don’t know much about video games to ease into the technology, perhaps by assigning interested students to develop a foreign language presentation about their favorite game or write a video game review using resources in the target language.

“We’re looking at a substantial part of our population that has a strong interest in video games,” says Bregni, who cites statistics that 70 percent of college students play games in some form. “How can we apply that to our advantage as language teachers? So, my message to teachers who are not very into video games is, allow your students to bring that to the classroom and use it as a resource.”