Teaching Spanish with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Abstract

Background: My personal journey to developing fluency in Spanish was through gaming, and so I felt strongly that this popular pastime would help my students, too. Ocarina of Time was a natural choice, as it is not only my favorite game, it is also dialogue-heavy and mimics real life speech, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play it with my students! Aim: My main objective was to improve students’ Spanish reading comprehension. Other objectives included: developing an understanding of the difference between equivalent and literal translation, developing a more comprehensive understanding of Spanish sentence structure, learning the 100 most used Spanish verbs, and being able to understand perfect verbs and object pronouns when encountered in text. Methods: Engaging learners through play, student collaboration, ungraded practice, semantic and syntactic reading comprehension, spiraling curriculum, and gamification of rote memorization. Results: Students’ Spanish reading comprehension improved rapidly, and so did their confidence in performing this skill. Students also learned 90%+ of the 100 top used Spanish verbs, as well as a large variety of other vocabulary. Conclusion: Video games are a viable resource for teaching a foreign language.