Abstract:

The manual creation of annotated language resources is usually an extremely expensive and time-consuming activity. By means of crowdsourcing activities like Games with a Purpose (GWAPs), the creation of such language resources saves time and reduces costs ensuring significantly high quality of the created resources. Out of ethical considerations, the source code of the game and the resulting language resources are freely available for other purposes and uses. We thus consider language GWAPs suitable for improving reading comprehension skills and contributing to developing them in classes of teaching French as a foreign language.

The language GWAP Zombilingo is not considered by their creators as a serious game as it aims to produce data, not to train learners in French. The game, however, presents some aspects suitable for task-based activities in language classes in the way these activities are defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). By playing Zombilingo, language learners contribute with their actions to the scientific purposes of the games – a complex annotation task of dependency syntax in French, but also develop and improve their reading competences.

The benefits of playing Zombilingo have different aspects for language learners. First of all, the paper describes specific language activities that develop learners’ reading competence: being provided with thematically different texts, language users are trained to deal with various topics, which enriches their vocabulary and improves their lexical competence; secondly, the paper looks at how the game deepens knowledge of syntax, which can later facilitate written expression. One important aspect of the paper is how grammar instructions and training for each level are presented in a comprehensible language. The progress from one level to the next represents controlled practice and monitoring the progress in language learning.

The aim is to share the good practices that the game encompasses not as a standalone method for learning French, but rather a supplement to the methodology.

Keywords:

Games with a Purpose, reading comprehension skills, task-based activities, French as a foreign language, Zombilingo.