Making mistakes feel safe
I helped design and pilot a role-playing workshop where language learners invent words together, so that getting a new language wrong feels like part of the game.
- Role
- Research Assistant
- Methods
- Workshop design, before-and-after surveys, pilot sessions, feedback sessions
- Built on
- Dialect, a tabletop role-playing game
- Outcome
- Run as a full study at Kyoto University; paper in progress
- Ask firstA short survey on how comfortable each person feels speaking Japanese
- Enter the worldPlayers learn the setting and take on a role within it
- Make up wordsConversations in words the group invents from English and Japanese
- Ask againThe same survey, then a feedback session on how it felt
The problem
University students moving to Japan from other countries need Japanese for everyday life, but many hold back from speaking it because every mistake feels public.
Could a game make mistakes feel like part of the fun, so learners are more willing to try?
My approach
A workshop built on a game. We based the sessions on Dialect, a tabletop role-playing game where players build an isolated community and invent its language. Our version had participants hold conversations in words they made up from English, the language they were more comfortable in, and Japanese, the one they were learning.
Measured before and after. Everyone took a short survey before and after the session about how comfortable they felt using the language.
My part. I worked closely with the lab team on nearly every step: designing the study protocol, writing the proposals for ethics review and reproducibility, running two pilot sessions with four participants, and leading the feedback sessions afterward.
What the pilots changed
The pilots ran with a mix of faculty, teaching assistants and students. Their feedback led to two changes. Each player now gets a concrete role, so they know where they stand in the made-up world. The reminder cards were rewritten, so the steps are easier to follow at the table.
Outcome
A partner lab at Kyoto University has since run the workshop as a full study, and the team is now writing it up as a paper. I'm still helping with the writing from grad school.