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Best way to get Asian teens to learn English? World of Warcraft. Least, that's what Edd Schneider and Kai Zeng think. Seeing no reason for MMOs to divide their playerbase, they think it' be a capital idea for servers to have "ESL" (English as a Second Language) areas where people from all languages can get together and practice their why-how-do-you-dos on each other.
Says Schneider:
...it just bothered me that games are supposed to let us play together, then [for most MMOs] they split everyone up on servers. I think that's totally asinine. If you play WoW, wouldn't you like to play against the best players from China? Everyone would say "yes." What we're hoping people are going to do is say, "Let's make an ESL-friendly server. Tell the Americans that not everyone is going to have perfect English, but they're going to want to learn.
Sounds OK by me, so long as people were watching said servers for racists/bigots/morons. Sydney's crawling with backpackers brushing up on their english, and it seems to work fine for them. And before you say "WoW probably isn't the best place to be learning the english language", consider this: they could be learning Western manners and etiquette on Xbox Live.
Using World Of Warcraft to Teach English? [Gamasutra]
