Game-Based Language Learning for Pre-School Children: A Design Perspective

During the last decade there has been a growing focus on preschool learning within education, especially with regard to the learning of basic literacies such as reading and writing. In addition to this many nation states increasingly focus on the basic literacy competences of the information society, ICT and English. This has, as suggested by for instance Scanlon and Buckingham (2007) boosted opportunities for the sale of educational material and hardware to children for home learning, but also for learning material that links content directly to the curriculum, to school work and to assessment. This paper will focus on the design of learning material for pre-school teaching and learning through the example of a game-based platform for learning English called Mingoville. com. Mingoville has been studied in connection with the project Serious Games on a Global Market Place (2007-11), where a number of games were followed into classroom environments across nations. Currently, the developers of Mingoville are working on a platform version that targets preschool learners and works on tablets as well as pcs and smartboards. The paper will discuss the implications of redesigning the platform for pre-school teaching and learning and how this affects game-based language teaching and learning with Mingoville.