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Digital Humanities and New Ways of Teaching pp 133–154Cite as

Gaming Literacy and Its Pedagogical Implications

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Part of the book series: Digital Culture and Humanities ((DICUHU,volume 1))

Abstract

Traditionally, there is a dichotomy of spoken and written language facility, but a new kind of ‘biliteracy’ seems to have emerged, whereby there is now one way to write a language in the online medium and another to write it offline. Be that as it may, online literacy could also be a source of influence on the offline literacy, just as speech has affected written literacy. For instance, contraction is now found in the latter. One big area of online literacy is gaming literacy, which is the focus of this paper. The impact of gaming literacy and justification for this study can be indirectly seen in the revenue statistics of online gaming. While parents of some youngsters often complain that online games ‘fracture’ their children’s language, this paper seeks to argue that gaming literacy not only is a creative development of language but also has its pedagogical potential for even aiding the acquisition of a second language (L2). This chapter begins with some brief discussion of gamer talk characteristics, followed by an explicit focus on gamer slang (“ludolects”), and then, with the aid of questionnaire findings and some literature reviews, goes on to explore the bigger picture: gaming literacy’s pedagogical implications in terms of “paratextuality”, social identity and learner autonomy.

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Acknowledgement

An early version of this research has been presented at the RIDCH Conferences 2017 in Hong Kong. The authors would like to thank Dr. Anna Wing-bo Tso, Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti, the conference participants, the students who completed the questionnaires, the reviewers as well as the editors for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, England, UK

    Noble Po-kan Lo

  2. City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Billy Cheuk-yuen Mok

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  1. Noble Po-kan Lo
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Correspondence to Noble Po-kan Lo .

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  1. The School of Arts and Social Sciences, The Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Anna Wing-bo Tso

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Lo, N.Pk., Mok, B.Cy. (2019). Gaming Literacy and Its Pedagogical Implications. In: Tso, A.Wb. (eds) Digital Humanities and New Ways of Teaching. Digital Culture and Humanities, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1277-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1277-9_8

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