Acquisition of Japanese as a Foreign Language Through a Baseball Video Game

Abstract: Video games have become increasingly more popular and more technologically advanced. This one-month study used interview, observation, self-report, and reading and listening test data to demonstrate and investigate how one intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) student improved his listening comprehension and kanji character recognition by playing a Japanese baseball video game. It is suggested that language acquisition was facilitated by the subject's ability to control the video game's repetitive, highly contextualized, and simultaneously presented aural and textual language. Limitations of the study and implications for the foreign language teacher are briefly discussed.