Children in the West are less and less likely to live in monolingual and monocultural environments. For the past forty years or so, language educators have been highlighting the value of an approach to languages based on comparative observation of how they function (Hawkins, 1984; Candelier, 2003). The challenge of a comparative approach to languages is to improve language skills, in particular through the development of metalinguistic skills, which are essential both for access to writing in the language of schooling and for learning foreign languages, etc. (Kervran, 2008; De Pietro 2004). Nevertheless, this approach is not commonly translated into practice. We decided to opt for the serious game to work on this skill. The use of games for pedagogical purposes has proven advantages, particularly in terms of motivation (Silva, 2008; Brougère, 2002; Chou 2015). Among the many types of existing games, the educational escape game has many advantages such as cooperation which allows the acquisition of social skills and the development of a collective intelligence necessary to solve the puzzles. In this proposal, we will present the ObRéCo project started in September 2022. This project is attached to a pilot centre for teacher training and research in education. The main objective of the project is to develop pedagogical and didactic resources based on games and digital technology, using the declared pedagogical practices of primary school teachers, so that practices favourable to the reflective and comparative observation of languages at school can be developed in these teaching contexts. We will first look at the different roles played by different languages in primary school and analyse their relationships by presenting the results of a questionnaire survey carried out among 234 teachers in the Académie de Grenoble. Secondly, we will present the technical and pedagogical choices that guided the development of the material co-constructed by the project's field actors and teacher-researchers and its implementation in an escape game. Finally, we will present the experimental protocol consisting of a pre-test/ treatment/ post-test of metalinguistic skills, with an experimental group and an active control group.
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Chou, Y-K (2015). Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards. Octalysis Media.
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Silva, H. (2008). Le jeu en classe de langue. Paris: CLE International.
