The Picture Game

"In the real world, conversations with sympathetic native speakers who are willing to help the acquirer understand are very helpful." - Stephen Krashen

I know from introspection and from conversations with other German students that we want to be able to talk and interact in an educational way with native speakers. Games with our classmates are fun but, to really learn the language, games are best played with native speakers. The internet provides unprecedented opportunity for this to happen.

I want to come up with games for langolab that are intense, addictive, and that force the players to learn each others' language. Here is my first attempt. The majority of construction work is already finished for this game.

The Game

Without loss of generality, I arrive at the langolab site (recall I am an English speaker learning German), and I'm paired with a German speaker learning English. We're both shown a picture and a question. I have to answer the question in English and do my best to answer the question in German:

Meanwhile, my partner Klaus in Germany is answering the same question in German and doing his best to answer the question in English. We each hit the SUBMIT button, and now we are looking at each others' responses. I am required to read Klaus' German response and correct his imperfect English:

Meanwhile, Klaus is correcting my imperfect German after reading my English answer. Of course, his German text is like all other foreign language text (including video captions) on langolab -- I can click on the words to get instant definitions in English and add any words to my set of flash cards:

This ensures that, no matter how bad Klaus' English is, I'm able to determine what he's trying to say because I can read his German. Of course Klaus can also click on my English words to get definitions in German, so he's also able to determine what I'm trying to say in spite of my terrible German.

As soon as Klaus and I finish correcting each others' text, we both hit the submit button again and now we can view each others' corrections:

Note that I can click on unfamiliar words in Klaus' correction, just like I could click on words in his original German response. After we feel like we've studied each others' corrections enough, we move on to the next picture/question combination.

We can add an interactive chat (which can also have the click-on-words feature) and also save responses, so that they can later be inspected and graded by a teacher or mentor, or so that Klaus and I can reminisce over our meeting and the German and English we respectively learned while trying to communicate with each other. Maybe this way, again WLOG, I could browse through the native German responses on the site and my curiosity about people's responses would thereby drive me to learn more German.

I Need Your Help and Feedback

Is there any way I could make this more useful to German teachers? Are there enough Germans learning English to make the game useful? My understanding is that most Germans can speak English fluently at a very young age. Hopefully there will be enough who at least want to improve their English skills to make the game tenable. What about the time zone difference between the US and Germany? Does anyone think that kills the idea? Finally, does something similar or identical to this already exist?

I would be totally overjoyed if anyone wants to partner together with me and go through the wireframes in a more detailed way. I'm not sure if I understand the teacher's world of language labs and partner teachers well enough. Please contact me through email or by leaving a comment if you would like to partner together. Anyone here in Chicago is invited with especial enthusiasm!