Open Access

This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children’s narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual differences in the effectiveness of the SCI and investigated whether they were related to variation in the children’s executive function skills such as cognitive inhibition and flexibility. Eighty 6- to 8-year-old French-speaking children participated in the narrative task and executive function tasks. In the narrative task, they first told a story (NAR1) based on the Stone Story made up of five wordless pictures involving a misunderstanding between two characters; each child then participated in the SCI, and finally narrated the story a second time (NAR2). Then, the children were presented with executive function tasks. Cognitive inhibition was assessed by the Animal Stroop test, and cognitive flexibility was assessed by a three-criterion classification task and a local/global figure-matching task. Group results showed that the children expressed the misunderstanding between the characters in mental terms significantly more in their second than in their first narratives. Results also showed individual variation in the post-SCI improvements and indicated a significant positive relation between large improvements in the children’s post-SCI narrative and their inhibitory control skills. No significant relations were found in this study between large improvements and the two cognitive flexibility measures. These results suggest that narrative-promoting interventions should closely consider individual differences in the effectiveness of their procedures and envisage working not only on promoting narrative content but also on the skills needed to benefit from the interventions.

A fairly large body of research has documented how digital games can be used in L1 education. However, there is still a lack of detailed studies on how literacy teachers go about teaching with games as multimodal texts in the classroom. Revisiting earlier empirical work on the use of the sandbox game Minecraft in primary school, the aim of this paper is to explore how a specific game challenge is enacted in practice as seen from a dialogic perspective. Drawing on theories on games and literacies, dialogic education, and teachers as professional practitioners, the paper presents the Game as Educational Challenge (GEC) model in order to understand how L1 teachers frame specific game challenges and facilitate dialogue with the students in relation to their game experiences. The model is used to reanalyse empirical examples of how teachers from three primary schools adopted a teaching unit with Minecraft through different pedagogical approaches. The findings show not only how the teachers' framing of the game challenges reflected their familiarity with the game, but also how they taught and related the game challenges to curricular aims in different ways. Moreover, it is found that the teachers negotiated authorial positions quite differently when facilitating classroom discussions with students about their game experiences.

The primary purpose of this ethnographic research is to explore what literacy practices unfold through and beyond gaming, how metagaming is conceptualized and how metagaming shapes the players' view and relation to their literacy practices with a particular focus on the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). Data from this study were drawn from ethnographic research of four young males within and around CS:GO in the context of Cyprus. Findings indicate that players go through a cycle of layering literacies in order to evolve their metagaming. Metagaming is about creating fluid forms of optimal or unexpected tactics and strategies during game play that go beyond the rules of the game to counter the opponent(s) by using pre-existing, current, and new knowledge from past game plays, as well knowledge and information from online and offline literacy practices. These layered literacies are multidirectional, interest-based and are part of learning related to high-level making decisions. The results contribute to the body of literature suggesting ways videogames and more specifically metagaming, could support literacy in L1 classrooms.

There is a productive discussion concerning the use of videogames in (literacy) education, focusing on their unique pedagogic potentials and on their interconnection with contemporary developments in textual and semiotic issues. Our main aim is to extend this discussion towards a more critical post-videogaming perspective, in the sense that videogames have to be considered as part and parcel of the contemporary, complex socio-cultural and historical context. Therefore, we focus on highlighting indicative aspects of this complexity, and we adopt concepts from the field of critical sociolinguistics, such as scales, strategies, and orders of literacy. We analyze a combination of quantitative (1.185 questionnaires) and qualitative data (6 ethnographic case studies) originating from children 11-15 years old. Our analysis reveals that, although videogaming tends to be a common youth practice, the other important differences/inequalities permeating parenting strategies, school practices, and children's literate identities remain unchanged, posing serious questions in terms of the promising educational use of videogames. We propose a historically sensitive perspective in order to connect videogames with schooling and especially L1 teaching.

This paper reviews research into the use of digital games in the L1 English classroom. It deals specifically with qualitative case study research investigating the potentialities of these new social, cultural and textual forms. The aim is to provide a critical review of the research to identify how teachers have been using these new forms of meaning making and to explore the literate practices associated with the study of digital games in the English classroom, as well as the games selected and the forms of classroom play utilised. Analysis of the 16 studies which met the inclusion criteria reveals that digital game literacies present opportunities for meeting the historical imperatives of English teaching, but also for providing new ways of thinking about how we support students to know themselves and the world. Connecting with students' lifeworlds, developing traditional and contemporary skills, questioning representations within texts, and supporting the aesthetic dimension of textual experience, were reported to be important outcomes that could be achieved through learning about digital games in English.