Rosie: Hello, This is Rosie from Lingo Flamingo. I'm one of the language tutors and Development Manager for Social Enterprise, and with me here today I've got Florence and Eleanor who have been supporting Lingo Flamingo as tutors with some of our learners over the last few months. If you can start by just introducing yourselves and tell us a bit more about your experience with Lingo Flamingo, just how it started perhaps.

Eleanor: I am a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow, and I became aware of Lingo Flamingo at the volunteers club. I was in a big rush, and so I was just basically looking for anything language related, because I'm a languages graduate, and so I remember having a really good discussion with Leah about regression to the mother tongue. And then got really, really, even though I haven't done a lot of work with elderly learners or elderly people before, I got really interested and passionate about the project and what Lingo Flamingo does. I was really excited to then be able to teach a class. I taught them from February until March-ish, until the pandemic hit. And I really enjoyed it.

01:32 

Florence: I worked with El to design the role playing game, Italian Passport, which you then used to use as a language learning tool in the class. I don't even speak Italian, so it was interesting. But my background in this project was more from the games side. So I've been playing video games all my life and then more recently I've got into board games and role playing games, things like Dungeons and Dragons. I just really love them as ways that you get to play, as an adult. So we thought it would be really great to use that as a language learning tool.

02:06 

Rosie: Wonderful, wonderful, thank you. Well, you know, actually, it's really interesting, because perhaps some of your learners, they have never really played similar role play games before, and certainly they were not really familiar with video games as such. So how do you feel, you know, what was your experience with these senior learners, from that perspective?

02:34 

Eleanor: Yeah, it was something that I was slightly nervous about when I was first introducing the game to them, because, as you say, it was quite, I think, unfamiliar for a lot of them. And it was something that was, I think, we've probably discussed it at some stage, but it was, as adults, we have very limited chance to actually play. And even if we play, it's in quite a structured way, in terms of you play a board game, or you might play a sport, or you might play with children, but it's been kind of very much I'm doing this, this is the game we're playing, rather than that kind of more free, creative sort of play, which I think has got a huge potential for, like, learning, and especially in language as well. And so, yeah, I was really excited to try it out with the elderly learners. It actually came, the idea came from a Tweet, actually. And there was a tweet from a guy who was playing D and D with his elderly French grandma. And I think it was in like, the last few months of her life, and she had pancreatic cancer, and she got really, really into it. And she didn't speak any English, but she called her character the Terminator (laughter) because it came from, like, she didn't know, she didn't know about the association at all. It was like she loved, like termites, because her character was this kind of, like woodland elf, and then it came from nature as well. And like, this was what they would do together. And she would, like, draw her character. And like, they went through this massive campaign, and she just got, she just really loved it, and was able to play. It was also that level of, kind of having a bit of an alter ego as well. And it was a thing very freeing, to be able to escape from, like, her life as it was at the minute, which is quite bounded, and she could see it becoming smaller. And so I think it was, that was the idea of the Tweet, which was, like, I would really love to use this as A. something to do for kind of like social and mental health well-being for the elderly learners, but then also as a language learning exercise too.

04:41 

Rosie: Absolutely. That sounds amazing actually. So do you think that the role play can be considered as an example of in-the-moment work in this case?

04:55 

Eleanor: Yeah, I think so, because as a language learning exercise it was very much against the sort of language learning that we are taught in schools, which is very much kind of rote learning, and it's, I think a lot of people are put off learning languages because of the fear of getting it wrong, and very much, then you're told in school, "No, that's the wrong word. You spelt that wrong". Whereas with using a role playing game for language learning, it was a lot more of an emphasis on communication, I think. And so it didn't really matter if you were using slightly the wrong word or you said it wrong. If you had tried to say in Italian, that was great, and I would like try to give them advantage on their role or something. And so it was then very much, I think, a lot more about in-the-moment people were kind of wanting to advance the story and using their Italian like that without kind of thinking like, right the outcome of this session is that I need to have learned 10 new words, and I need to do this. It was a lot more: I'm playing this game, and I'm doing this, and I'm in the moment, and I happen to be using a bit of Italian while doing that.

05:58 

Florence: Yeah, we've kind of wanted there to not be a separation between the learning and the game. We thought it would be much better, because, remembering back to school, say like in Maths, you would have a Maths game, but it would really be a game with some Maths added on at the end. It was sort of a bit awkward. But having them overlapped and interlinked made it feel much more natural, I feel, to be learning and to be speaking. Obviously part of the idea was that the people you were tutoring probably wouldn't be able to go on a group trip to Italy. And so this was kind of like the best you could do was, like, simulate the environment.

06:32 

Eleanor: Because languages, I think it's the sort of thing, it's such a shame that in Britain so many people are put off learning them because, like, being monolingual isn't like a normal state for the human brain to be in. Learning languages, I think it's something that everybody can do, because they've already done it. They've got the kind of innate ability to do it. I think just a lot of people maybe having had bad experiences in school, are put off, and so it was very much like the best way to learn a language, I think having not studied it, at any great depth, is basically that kind of emphasis on communication and you just muddle through. And it's something that we all do all the time with our various languages which we speak well, like I still learn new English words, even though it's my mother tongue, for example.

07:15 

Rosie: With that in mind, how did you then go about preparing for creating, delivering this session, putting it all together?

07:27 

Eleanor: So I was already following, you know, the Lingo Flamingo 12 week/10 week course, and so that was already structured around certain vocab topics and certain topics of conversation slowly build up the language proficiency and vocab. And so we loosely structured it around that. And so, say it was a week when I was teaching them various different words for food, then it mght happen that then in the narrative, their characters would be going around the market, and they had to, kind of like get supplies to kind of last them in the story, to like, the next session, to have enough energy, and so then they were able to kind of use their food, their food words that they learned in that role play. In terms of, like, the mechanics of the game that is where I went to the more experienced gamer, because I knew, I'd played a bit of D and D before, and it's quite, it can be quite complex. And so we knew that we needed quite a simplified version of the game. So I don't know if you want to talk about how we prepared that.

08:30 

Florence: Yeah, so generally if you are playing a game, mostly the more rules there are, the more difficult it is to learn, and often people feel out of their depth in a game that isn't that complex, just because you are being given a lot of information with almost no context for it. Being told you can move this much, and then you can do this, and then you can do this, and you're like, "I don't understand anything you've just said". And so we tried to keep it really simple. And one of the good things about like a role playing game, as opposed to a game of very strict rules, like Sudoku, or tennis, or something like that, is that you really can just improvise, and it's about improvising between the players and El who is like running the session. You're really making up a rules as you go. And so we just, I just kept one simple mechanic of the game, which was to use a 10 sided dice. You could easily use a six sided dice, but that was just for anything luck based. So like, checking to see if you convinced someone for example, if you're like, "Oh, let me use your gondola". It would be like, "Oh, roll the dice". And then, like, there is, like, that's very much an element of fun, of luck. And then I think a couple of times, maybe somebody didn't do very well, and tried to convince you anyway, but it worked out alright. So like having a little rule like that also might make it easier for people who are slightly less inclined to role play, because obviously it's the same with acting, some people are very excited and very ready to do it, and lots of people are very in their shell and embarrassed about it. I think having something little that you can do like roll the dice or draw a card or something like that is an easy way to ease people into playing, if they are not used to it.

Eleanor: Everyone loves to roll a dice.

Rosie: So that would be one of those D and D dices that you would be using, or maybe a number dice. What sort of little objects would you bring into class?

10:22 

Eleanor: Yeah. So it mostly was like a 10 sided dice, which is like one of the D and D specific dice, I guess. But you could easily do it on a six sided dice or even just because the number is just like, say if you've got a low number, you wouldn't say for an example if you were trying to persuade someone, you got a low number: doesn't work, they're not having any of it. If you get a high number, yeah, they're completely won over and they're gonna do what you wanted them to do. So you could even just, like, put a number up for that.

10:54 

Florence: There's lots of things. Also you can easily search things like "dice roller" on Google. And there's tons of websites where you can select the number of sides and how many you want to roll, so even if, like, we just went to a board game shop and bought some dice. But obviously, if you're doing it during pandemic, and that's not really an option, it's find them free online or on your phone. So it shouldn't be an issue.