The Regional Language Centre (RELC), an educational project of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), is located in Singapore. The members of SEAMEO are Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The associate members are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Norway.

At the recent RELC Seminar 2008 graced by His Excellency Dato’ Sri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, Malaysia’s Minister for Education and SEAMEO Council President, IAHGames had the honour to present a paper entitled “From English to Gamelish: What should teachers do about online game English?” Seminar participants benefited from the collective wisdom of no less than 12 invited distinguished speakers as well as many more speakers and paper presenters.

Thomas Chong, IAHGames Director for Education Initiatives and an RELC alumni, presented IAHGames’ paper on “Gamelish” and shared insights on the impact of technology and interactive digital media (such as online games) on language use and language teaching.

Mr Thomas Chong, who is also a Fellow at Stanford University, shared a recent study that focused on the use of English by primary school students “in-world” i.e. whilst students were in an online game-play. The types of sentences, spelling and syntax were recorded. Teachers were interviewed for their comments on the type of English used “in-world” or what is hereby coined as “Gamelish”. Students are doing a lot of writing online, within fast-paced online games as well as blogs. By all grammar rules, the sentence structure of these written words is not right but what should teachers do about it? What strategies can teachers adopt? Indeed, whether language teachers like it or not, they are constantly called upon to negotiate issues of language varieties. Thomas also provided suggestions for teachers to negotiate such uncharted waters and listed the possible consequences if teachers banned “Gamelish” altogether or on the other hand, encouraged “Gamelish”. Language teachers were also invited to lead the way for students, parents and colleagues to make sense of our rapidly changing linguistic scene in this digital age.

IAHGames is also honoured to be able to share and learn at the annual RELC International Seminar, a major event in language education in Asia, typically attended by some 500 scholars, lecturers, curriculum developers and educationists from the region and beyond.

IAHGames hereby invites any educator to contact us if there is an interest to jointly conduct action research on the use of online games as education tools, enhancing teaching and learning. Please email education@iahgames.com

To view more photos of the event, please visit the gallery.