REVIEW OF COMPUTER GAMES AND LANGUAGE LEARNING Computer Games and Language Learning

As one of the first book-length treatments of the topic, Mark Peterson’s Computer Games and Language Learning offers a broad, comprehensive overview of the study of computer games in CALL. As stated in the preface, the author aims to answer two major questions: “Is participation in computer gaming beneficial for language learners?” and “Does computer gaming represent, as has been claimed in relation to other spheres, a paradigm shift in language education?” (p. xi). To answer the first question, the author reviews practically all the research on the topic and concludes that while there is evidence that computer games may have a potential beneficial impact on language learning, there is not enough evidence for a clear affirmative. While answering the second question is a “challenging endeavor” (p. 131), the author argues convincingly that the rising popularity of computer games does not signal a paradigm shift but rather may simply indicate another false dawn phenomenon, a bandwagon-like tendency of the CALL community to claim a new technology has revolutionary potential, only to abandon it for a second new trend before thoroughly researching the first. Peterson argues this may be the case with computer games; even though they have been used in CALL since the 1980’s, they have never been fully mainstreamed or “integrative” (Bax, 2003, p. 18) vis-à-vis language teaching, and have only landed on radars again recently because of societal popularity. In response, Peterson includes in his book a well-designed study of language learning in a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), the latest game genre to be hailed by many for its compatibility with SLA principles. This application of the wide diversity of theory and research presented throughout the book allows it to serve not only as an introduction and reference for the field, but also as an example of how one might do research in it.