RAFAELLEON'S PROFILE

author=Zod
Hello!
author=RafaelLeon
1) Has forum usage (posting and viewing forums) helped you to develop your writing and reading skills in the English language? If yes, how?


Actually, when I started to consult English forums, my reading level was already pretty high. However, since English is a particularly idiomatic language, forums have allowed me to understand many more modal verbs and hardly evident expressions. Since I'm not a native English speaker, my phrasing tends to be awkward. Nevertheless, given that forum replies are often like "written" oral replies, the phrasing has become more natural. Somehow, it has melted with the environmental style. And, of course, it has helped me to improve my oral skills.

author=RafaelLeon
2) Has game development on RPG Maker (along with forum usage, or without forum usage) helped you to develop skills in the English language? If yes, how?


Of course. Well, since I'm not a native speaker, while developing my games, I sometimes think the sentences in Spanish or French. The need of translating them forces me to look the problematic words up in a dictionary and, therefore, to slowly expand my vocabulary skills. It's the same when I have to reply in forums.

Finally, Kylaila interestingly pointed out the fact that, RM being a hobby for most of us, we don't lack the motivation to search the vocabulary we don't have and, in general, to make our sentences understandable by the community.

If you ever decide to make a paper on this subject, you can obviously use these pieces of information. Thus, please inform me as soon as the final product is ready!

See you!

Thank you for the response! I'll make sure you know when the paper is ready and if I'll publish it.

author=Red_Nova
I'm a native English speaker and I can answer yes to both questions. As someone who suffers from severe ADHD, sometimes I say three different things in one sentence. I want to say a lot, but when I start talking, it comes out as a jumbled mess and no one understands anything I say. My brain races about two sentences ahead of my mouth and I begin to stumble over my words and often say something completely different. When people are talking to me, I begin to zone out and think about other things not even remotely related to what the person is trying to tell me. Often I would have to ask people to repeat what they've just finished saying.

On forums, it's different. Here, I actually have time to collect my thoughts and lay them out in an organized fashion. I can look at my sentences and think, "Is this what I want to say?" After I read over my whole post, I see parts where I don't feel like I made my point clearly, and so I edit it.

It's different for dialogue writing for my games, as well. At first, I just write down whatever comes to mind. As the cutscenes or speeches move along, I find that I begin to stray from my initial intention with off-topic dialogue and such, so I got back and edit the text to make it more focused. Sometimes I reread things my character says and think to myself, "There has to be a better way to say this," so I rewrite and rewrite until I finally have what I want to say.

This procedure has trickled into my real life dialogue now. When someone is talking to me, I can both listen to them and begin forming my own responses immediately. I can select my words better and faster.

Yours in an interesting take! Although it's not related especifically to English language learning, I think your example really tackles the benefits of using forums for writing improvement in general. Just one question (I'm sorry if it's too personal) but have you taken medications for it or you're trying to handle it in different ways?

Thank you all so far :)

author=karins_soulkeeper
Hi!

My answer to both is actually no. This might be because we here in my country are force-fed english. If we can't master english, we can't advance. Though being in the forums taught me to be more watchful of my diction. Probably due to the fear of sounding either illiterate or disrespectful.

Karins, may I ask where you're from? :)

Thank you all for the responses so far!

Dear all,

Recently I've become more and more interested in investigating the link between language learning and gameplay/game development (I'm an applied linguist). I don't post much here, but I've been browsing threads of all sorts for some time now and I realized that many members don't have English as their native language, even though they (or you) speak English quite fluently.

So, I have some questions for you guys (and I wish you'd take some of your time to answer this; I might develop a paper on it, if you consent, of course):

1) Has forum usage (posting and viewing forums) helped you to develop your writing and reading skills in the English language? If yes, how?

2) Has game development on RPG Maker (along with forum usage, or without forum usage) helped you to develop skills in the English language? If yes, how?

This is particularly intriguing to me on a personal level, since I've been frequenting forums for quite a long time and I've always thought of how my English skills have improved considerably when interacting with other people towards the same goal (developing a game, for instance).

Thank you in advance!

Thank you all for your responses! :)

I didn't know there were other Brazilians here. But it's a fact that we're very technologically engaged :)