Reading Performance and Literacy Practice in the Context of MMO Games

Constance Steinkuehler · Catherine Compton-Lilly · Elizabeth King

Thu., June 11, 2:00–3:00, Old Madison (3rd floor, East/Southeast)

Recent games-and-literacy research suggests that games are an important vehicle for literacy learning. Gee (2003) argues that videogames are a semiotic domain, that learning to play a game (or genre of game) is to gain a new form of literacy (one of many, as literacies are multiple), and that the study of games and learning is important to our understanding of how an individual comes to understand the “design grammar” of a semiotic domain generally. In a similar vein, Steinkuehler (2006) analyzed a single turn of talk taken during routine play in a MMO game to show how participation in such virtual worlds is participation in a “big D Discourse” (Gee, 1999) requiring a complex and nuanced sets of multimodal social and communicative practices tied to the particular community within the game, yet extending beyond it to include an online world of game-related fandom such as web sites, chatrooms, wiki, blogs, and email. Steinkuehler (2007) extends this work by surveying this constellation of digital and print textual practices entailed in online gaming to demonstrate that such practices not only meet state and national standards in reading, writing, and technology, but also at times even exceed them. And in another study, Leander and Lovvorn (2006) trace how such practices traverse both in-school and out-of-school contexts to create a “literacy network” that is consequential to students’ identity, agency, and engagement. And at last year’s GLS conference (Commeyras, 2008, 2009), we saw how the role-playing game Neverwinter Nights provided a struggling high school reader multiple opportunities to engage in meaning reading practices as a way to strengthen his reading skills.

Based on this body of work, we set out to investigate differences in reading performance for adolescent males in school-related texts versus game-related texts. Participants were 22 game-loving guys in an after-school program based on the MMO game World of Warcraft (Steinkuehler & King, 2009). In this study, we compared each individual’s performance on grade-leveled text from school textbooks versus the collectively written online game manual WoWwiki. Participants were first given the Qualitative Reading Inventory (Lauren & Schudt Caldwell, 2006) to diagnose their reading abilities, then read either a school textbook text written at their reading level or a game text assessed at their reading level (counterbalanced to eliminate any ordering effects). Outcome measures included miscue analysis of their performance on each text, recollection and comprehension questions to assess their recall of the content just read, and their qualitative attitudes toward each text. This procedure was piloted with a subset of 6 participants in the program, revealing not only differences in reading performance on the two texts — with individuals performing roughly two grade levels higher on the game-related texts than the school texts — but also differences in recall and comprehension. In this presentation, we review our findings from the full investigation and argue for a more robust model of reading development — one that not only better accounts for reading performance across later developmental stages (here, adolescence) and not just the two endpoints (early readers, adult readers) but also better captures performance in non-school venues where reading is situated in the contexts of interest where motivated reading actually occurs.

References

Commeyras, M. (2008). Reading Drax reading Neverwinter Nights. Paper presented at the GLS Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, July 10–11.

Commeyras, M. (2009). Drax’s reading in Neverwinter Nights: With a tutor as henchman. eLearning, 6(1), pp. 43–53.

Gee, J. P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis. New York: Routledge.

Gee, J. P. (2003). What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lauren, L., & Schudt Caldwell, J. (2006). Qualitative reading inventory (4th Ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Leander, K., & Lovvorn, J. (2006). Literacy networks: Following the circulation of texts and identities in the school-related and computer gaming-related literacies of one youth. Curriculum & Instruction, 24(3), 291–340.

Steinkuehler, C. A. (2006). Massively multiplayer online videogaming as participation in a Discourse. Mind, Culture, & Activity, 13(1), 38–52.

Steinkuehler, C. (2007). Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. eLearning, 4(3) 297–318.

Steinkuehler, C., & King, E. (2009). Digital literacies for the disengaged: Creating after school contexts to support boys’ game-based literacy skills. On the Horizon, 17(1), 47–59.