Recently, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has gained importance in today's educational scene as a way to prepare students for the 21st-century world, where being communicatively competent in foreign languages has become essential. Considering the flexibility of the approach and the need for teachers to adapt it to students' needs and interests, different methodologies, such as digital game-based learning (DGBL), have been integrated within CLIL to enhance learners' motivation towards mathematics. This chapter presents an interdisciplinary didactic proposal based on the DGBL methodology to teach mathematics within a CLIL context. The designed activities are based on the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, directed to the fifth grade of primary education, and their objectives and suggested assessment are presented. Finally, the didactic implications and the potential of the proposal for learning mathematics and the target language are discussed.
TopIntroduction
In a world where globalization and mobility between countries have become the norm, bilingual education has been increasingly gaining importance to prepare students for the real world (Coyle et al., 2010; García, 2009), a multilingual and multicultural world where being communicatively competent in languages other than one’s mother tongue has become an essential requirement (Council of Europe, 2019; European Commission, 2003). As García (2009) explains:
[Bilingual Education] focuses not only on the acquisition of additional languages, but also on helping students to become global and responsible citizens as they learn to function across cultures and worlds, that is, beyond the cultural borders in which traditional schooling often operates (p. 18).
However, bilingual education may sometimes be a frustrating process for learners (López & Tashakkori, 2006; Oliveira et al., 2020) and, under these circumstances, teachers may feel the need to look for new, different methodologies to increase students’ motivation and engagement towards learning.
Among the different approaches to bilingual education, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has grown in the past 40 years and it has become widely implemented in schools across Europe (Lopriore, 2018) and increasingly in other contexts (Sasajima, 2019; Turner & Fielding, 2020). Indeed, it has been proved that CLIL’s dual focus on both content and language provides a quality education to students (Egger & Lechner, 2012; McDougald, 2018). Therefore, there is no doubt that this approach presents an interesting learning framework: its flexibility, allowing various language-supportive methodologies (e.g., enhanced learner autonomy or formative assessment) to be used in its implementation (Coyle et al., 2010).
In the same line, the use of games in the classroom, commonly referred to as Game-Based Learning (GBL), has also grown in relevance due to its proven potential for enhancing the interest and the academic achievement of students in a variety of disciplines (Greipl et al., 2020; Rojas-Mancilla et al., 2019; Yanes & Bououd, 2019), including mathematics (Holguín-García et al., 2020; Klymchuk, 2017). More recently, however, the profusion of new technologies applied to education has led to the evolution of this approach to learning into Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL), whose potential has been deeply explored (Barr, 2019; Becker, 2017; Chee, 2016). In this light, research has examined how DGBL can be implemented in the language classroom (Casañ-Pitarch, 2018; Mahayanti et al., 2020) and its potential for vocabulary acquisition (Fithriani, 2021), writing performance (C.-J. Lin et al., 2018), creative writing (Lee, 2019), and oral skills (Hwang et al., 2016). Studies also suggest that such linguistic gains could also be achieved by implementing DGBL in CLIL (Dourda et al., 2013; Maraffi et al., 2017; Rodríguez et al., 2014). Furthermore, experts have studied how DGBL can be used in the mathematics lessons in primary (Byun & Joung, 2018) and secondary education (Denham, 2019), and how it can facilitate the development of different mathematics-related skills such as mathematical knowledge (Siew, 2018) and fluency (Brezovszky et al., 2015), among others. However, there are few proposals, up to the researchers’ knowledge, on how to integrate DGBL in a CLIL mathematics class. Therefore, this chapter aims at developing an interdisciplinary didactic proposal based on the DGBL methodology to teach mathematics within a CLIL context. This proposal includes a series of activities designed for the fifth grade of Primary Education, all of them using the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch.