Temat: Why More Polish Women Than Men Play RPG?
Marcin Barańczak:
Why even bother? Better toss them to GB for a month or so and
call it a LARP.
Well that is the best way to practice if someone has the time and cash. Not everyone does. And the less practice someone has, the more apt they are to lose what they have from regression.
At proficiency-level most people become the "native speaker" in their firms in Poland: translating documents, dealing with foreign business partners, taking business trips, etc. (Sounds like these are modules in a Longman book or activities on the CAE.)
Proficiency-level speakers have no place to practice within Poland unless they hang out with native speakers of course. Repetition of native-speaker-type duties (with nowhere to continually develop) only degrades their language facility over time.
Hey, believe it or not, it happens to some English natives in Poland. They get here; teach the same subjects and vocabulary over and over; and viola: their diction gets narrowed through repetition.
To be more serious. In my opinion this can be good practice, but… the rpg itself requires specific people ( If you dont want
hear sentences such as: „and again you did not take your medicines”).
Yes and no. Yes, you are quite right. No, it does not depend on the people. As the Game Master, I build the world. The world is the honey that attracts the bees.
There are several styles of GMing. Running Hack Master, for example, will not work to practice language. Running a game like a story by George RR Martin will do it.
Using proper game nouns, like "tulip" for example, rather than lots of description with adjectives, adverbs, metaphor and simile will also take away from the practice. A Zelda quest like "bring me a red tulip" is pretty sad indeed when the description is "you see a field of red tulips."
Nouns like stamen, petal, stem, pollen, leaf, vien, and adjectives like sheen, mat, velveteen, deciduous, coniferous, etc are parts of flora and fauna speech. Even a flower can be a challenge to some. In a collaborative setting, such as RPGs create, the participants help each other.
RPGers, stereo-typically speaking, will not catch on to the Role Playing as a learning tool - even though they did role playing in a language classroom by practicing "job interview," "trip to the trtavel agency" or some other mundane action before CAE level.
Sadly many players think of RPGs as akin to imaginary shooter games. This is after my time, when computer programmers made RPGs into something like DOOM. In a GRRM storyline, hack and slash without thinking and the character ends up dead really quick.
Same in a Gibson 2020 "modern" setting. Hell, same IRL today.
As a GM for language practice sessions, my games rarely have such "in your face" life and death confrontations though the world itself has many conflagations going on that can involve players.
Same goes for boldness (some are shy: „so what do
you do? Hitting him with your staff? No? Cast a spell? No? Retreat maybe? No? Drink a potion? No?”). In the end there would be two
choices. You are learning englisch by committing an rpg session,
or you play a session using not-very-englisch englisch (or the
fishes or the fish tank as goes polisch phrase).
Here I would disagree. Give these shy people a mask that deindividuates them and they get comfortable. Likewise, the environment is collaboratively built and co-operatively sustained and not academically competitive.
Playing a game like RPG requires imaginative improvisation and that requires trust between people. If I talked like a retard on the tram full of people, passengers around me would be threatened and feel uncomfortable. To overcome this challenge between a room of strangers, I do trust building games. Plus I act like a retard. LOL.
I also structure the storyline to make things comfortable for first time RPGers.
There is one more thing. If you dont want to do things in the
turtle mode then you need to communicate verbally. This one can be nasty. Chatting with American is easy, chatting with Scot or drunken Irishman is hard, chatting witch Englischman is extreme In difficulty.
You have never heard my Pakistani/Indian accents my friend, let me tell you. LOL Even I do not know what I am saying! Although the players with IT jobs will catch me. LOL!