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Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

Developing new literacies using commercial

videogames as educational tools
Pilar Lacasa a,∗ , Rut Martı́nez a,1 , Laura Méndez b,2
aUniversity of Alcalá, Facultad de, Documentación, Aulario Marı́a de Guzmán,
Calle San Cirilo S/N., Alcalá de Henares, Madrid 28801, Spain
b Facultad de Psicologı́a, UNED, Ciudad Universitaria s/n., Madrid 28040, Spain

Abstract
The general aim of this paper is to examine how videogames, supported by conversations and theatrical performances in the
classroom, can contribute to the development of narrative thought as present in written compositions in various contexts. Given
that one of the primary ecological influences on children is the mass media, we discuss how media messages create an environment
that can teach people about the rules, attitudes, values and norms of society [Bakhtin, 1999; Gee, 2003, 2004; Jenkins, Purushotma,
Ciinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2006]. From a methodological point of view we adopt a sociolinguistic, ethnographic and action
research perspective. Our data come from a workshop in which the research team, acting as participant observers, collaborated
with the teacher and the students of a primary school classroom with 10 boys and 11 girls from eight to nine years of age. We
worked with the class during seven meetings, of approximately 2 h each. All the sessions were video-recorded and we also gathered
all the children’s written productions. Finally, each of the participant investigators produced daily summaries of the sessions, thus
enabling multiple interpretations of the same activities. An inductive approach to the data has been taken, with the aim of defining the
analytical categories that consider participants’ activities in specific contexts. Our main results show that children’s reconstructions
of videogames stories are dependent on specific contexts; for example, whether they are re-elaborating the content of the game
while they are playing it, writing a script some days later, or developing a web page.
© 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Keywords: Videogames; New literacies; Narrative; Theater; Researcher–teacher collaboration; Bakhtin

1. Preliminary questions

Thinking about videogames games as semiotic and cultural tools, this paper explores their role in the develop-
ment of oral, performed, and written narratives in the classroom. As participant observers we have been collaborating
in the school with children and their teacher in a multimedia workshop which had the aim of teaching children
to tell and play stories based on a videogame, “Tomb Raider,” that was chosen by the children as one of their
most popular games. Our approach combines three parallel, interrelated and mutually informing modes of inquiry;

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 918855004; fax: +34 918855005.

E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (P. Lacasa), [email protected], [email protected] (R. Martı́nez),
[email protected] (L. Méndez).
URLs: http://www2.uah.es/gipi/ (P. Lacasa), http://www2.uah.es/gipi/ (L. Méndez).
1 Tel.: +34 918855004; fax: +34 918855005.
2 Tel.: +34 91 3986594.

0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.

doi:10.1016/j.linged.2008.02.001
86 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

i.e. ethnographic, textual, and conceptual models drawn from the work of Bakhtin (1999). Before presenting this
theoretical background some introductory questions are briefly introduced in order to contextualize the more spe-
cific aims of this paper by considering why is it useful to look at commercial videogames as potential educational
tools.
Our first question relates to the idea of why one should introduce commercial videogames into the classroom. Many
studies have pointed out the advantages of introducing children to the new media by focusing on them as educational
instruments. New literacies need to be acquired to participate actively in our society and contemporary culture. Let us
consider some examples of these investigations. Many years ago, Lippman (1922/1960) highlighted the importance
of the media as powerful agents of socialization that give members of the public a great deal of information that
cannot be confirmed by sources other than themselves. Along these lines, Dyson (1997) explored the construction of
new literacies and values in relation to children’s comprehension of “media heroes” by using new and old symbolic
codes. More recently, Buckingham and Scanlon (2003) have distinguished between popular and official culture, and
suggested that there is a need to bring into the classroom what pupils already experience outside school. Other authors
have referred to the presence of cultural models in videogames by assuming that they reinforce or question the player’s
perspective on the world (Bogost, 2006; King & Krzywinska, 2006).
The second question refers to the idea of what can be learned from using commercial videogames. James Paul Gee
(2007) answers this question when he says “Good video games are good for your soul” when they are played with
thought, reflection, and engagement with the world around them. Games can be tools for teaching and learning to think
when participants focus on the game and discover its rules; in this respect they are acting as “videogame designers”.
According to Gee, players co-author games by playing them, because if a player does not interact with the game by
making choices about what will happen, no play takes place.
But we can still ask, why introduce videogames in the school as educational tools in order to learn how to tell
and play out stories? Jenkins’ response relates to his notion of “rewriting schools”: “More and more literary experts
are recognizing that enacting, reciting, and appropriating elements from pre-existing stories is a valuable and organic
part of the process by which children develop cultural literacy” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Ciinton, Weigel, & Robison,
2006, p. 177). From this perspective we need to consider how videogames are sources of cultural narratives that
can be redeployed in school literacies, as Juul (2006) points out, since narrative has been theorized in many dif-
ferent ways. We will return to this topic later on when we explore the theoretical framework that underlies this
research.

2. Objectives

The general aim of this paper is to analyze the potential of commercial videogames, supported by conversations and
theatrical performances in the classroom, as educational instruments. We focus on Tomb Raider, an action-adventure
videogame originally released in 1996 for PC, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.
Our specific objectives include the following:

1. To examine how specific goals of teachers, researchers and children relate to particular uses of the videogame.
We focus on how specific uses and goals evolve through an extracurricular workshop. We define these goals as
principles organizing the activities of participants.
2. To study the contribution of videogames to the construction of new literacies in relationship to the process of
building multiple narratives in the classroom. Particular attention will be paid to the different situations in which
these narratives are produced.

In the following pages we focus on some of the Bakhtin’s concepts in order to explain the social processes that take
place in the classroom; his work offers a model of how people construct meaning together, by talking not just with
other people in everyday life but also with “heroes” in specific cultural products.

3. Looking at videogames in the classroom from a Bakhtinian perspective

Bakhtin analyzed Dostoevsky’s novels, in which the author permits his characters to speak in their own voices with
a minimum of interference (Bakhtin, 1999). There are three aspects of Bakhtin’s work that are relevant to our own
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 87

objectives in this research. First, the concept of polyphony as a metaphor to understand social relations in the classroom
in the general context of the school, understood as a social institution (Olson, 2003) and in the specific context of
collaborative work based on the videogame. Second, we look at how voices in the classroom can be understood in the
broad context of how popular culture is interwoven into specific social lives and personalities. Taking as a point of
departure Bakhtin’s notion of embodied cognition, we explore the concept of literacy as an embodied activity related
to particular semiotic domains in which learning takes place (Gee, 2006). Finally, we enter the universe of narrative
voices by considering how Bakhtin referred to the relationships between hero and author. During the classroom
workshop, the children recreate Lara Croft, popular culture heroine. Taking a Bakhtinian perspective, we will see
how the children contribute their own meaning and perspectives on the world through their construction of character.
We explore how Bakhtin’s contributions in this field enable us to penetrate specific concepts in order to understand
relationships between videogames and narratives, for example, “vision of the world ”, “interactivity”, “immersion”,
etc. (Aarseth, 2001; Jenkins, 2006; Ryan, 2001).

3.1. Classrooms as a polyphonic context

According to Morson and Emerson (1990), polyphony is one of Bakhtin’s most intriguing and original concepts, but
he “never explicitly defines polyphony”. The Bakhtinian concept of polyphony helps us describe both the inevitable
diversity of goals and voices in the school, and a potential pedagogical approach to that diversity.
“A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices
is in fact the chief characteristics of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude
of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather
a plurality of consciousness, with equal rights and each with its own world, combined but not merged in
the unity of the event. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only
objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.” (Bakhtin, 1999,
pp. 6–7)
Dialogue, according to the text, is related to a set of conditions that model exchanges between two persons; dialogue
means communication between persons who are subjects and not simple objects. If we concentrate now on how often
institutions focus on the abstract and objective role of individuals much more than on the individual person, as defined
by his/her own subjectivity and acting in everyday life, Bakhtin’s ideas help us to propose a social relationships model
for classrooms. Traditional models of education are not dialogical, they involve the imposition and recognition of a
single voice: the teacher’s, who is like the author in a monologic novel. As Olson writes, educational contexts need
to take into account individual subjectivities, which are partially independent of institutional roles, and their role in
learning:
“Our own subjectivities, our own private as well as shared public beliefs, attitudes, feelings and meanings not
only are important to us as individuals but are at the root of all learning and development, even the learning and
development of social routines and of collective representations.” (Olson, 2003, p. 143)
The main point here is that subjectivities are the root of all kinds of learning and development. This approach is
especially interesting as a way of understanding the relationships established in the classroom between the teacher, the
children and the investigators when we worked with the Tomb Raider videogame; it is in that context that we analyse
how social relationships can be understood in terms of institutional roles and also of individuals, considering all of
them as specific subjectivities.
Concretely, participants’ expectations of each other are shaped both by the personal and the institutional practices.
For example, on the one hand the teacher is constrained by the curriculum, whether she chooses to use books or
videogames. On the other hand the children will interpret and use videogames from outside the educational context,
potentially viewing them as pure play, and thus may have difficulty in viewing them as educational instruments. Finally,
researchers may see themselves as playing a mediating role between students and the teacher, but are also influenced
by their professional roles and the expectations that others have of them. In this paper, we analyze the extent to
which joint participation in playing videogames allows the individual subjectivities and goals of all participants to be
aligned.
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3.2. Diversity in social words, dialogue and literacy

Bakhtin also interprets the novel as a dialog between multiple discourses situated in multiple social and cultural
contexts, writing:
“The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a
diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into
social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations
and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions,
languages that serve the specific socio-political purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan,
its own vocabulary, its own emphases)- this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment
of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre.” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 263)
That is to say, a diversity of voices organized in a stratified form coexists in the speech of the novel. Accepting this
idea we can also say that many discourses coexist in children’s popular culture outside the classroom,
“Language lives only in the dialogic interaction of those who make use of it. Dialogic interaction is indeed the
authentic sphere where language lives. The entire life of language, in any area of its use (in everyday life, in
business, scholarship, art, and so forth), is permeated with dialogic relationships.” (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 183)
If dialogue among multiple discourses and forms of speech is indispensable, introducing it into the classroom is far
from simple. In fact, as Gee points out, it involves introducing students to multiple semiotic domains. Each domain is “a
set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g. oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds,
gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings” (2003, p. 18). From this perspective,
the content of videogames is clearly distinct from the type of content that is normally found in academic disciplines
but provides opportunities for learning about different semiotic domains by involving at least four main processes:

• Learning new approaches to the world, using new kinds of discourses.

• Participating in a social group that shares this domain.
• Obtaining resources that prepare people for new ways of learning and solving problems.
• An active process of “critical learning”, in which the learner is situated on a meta-level that allows him/her to
establish relationships among the parts of a global system.

Developing this theoretical model allow us to focus on a dimension of human activity that goes beyond writing and
literary content and involves a meta-semiotic consciousness of both linguistic and visual modes of communications.
In addition to being multimodal, our workshop also involved the use of drama, since the teacher chose to have the
children develop a play based on the Tomb Raider videogame. Her goal was to help the children acquire different
forms of literacy as related to the use of multiple discourses. Schonmann (2006) provides a framework for the study of
theatre in the classroom, differentiating education for theatre and education through theatre. Education through theatre
refers mainly to theatre as a means of achieving educational objectives, such as improving learning skills, social skills
and one’s self-image. Education for drama/theatre means focusing on it as a specific art form. Following Schonmann,
we view school plays and the play we studied as embodying elements of both these orientations. First, since theatre
is an art form with a language of its own, participating in drama involves learning to use this language and achieving
new modes of communication. Secondly, as a pedagogical tool, theatre enables students to develop identification with
characters. Finally, from a sociological/cultural perspective we assume that drama/theatre demands meaning making for
individuals and for society. In the following analysis, we consider the relative balance between these three perspectives
(Artistic/Esthetic; Pedagogical and Sociological-Cultural) in our interpretation of what happened in our workshop
when the students planned, wrote, and performed a play.

3.3. Discourse, narrative and videogames

Up to this point we have been exploring classrooms as universes of multiple voices in which a polyphonic dialogue
might exist. Moreover, we have being focusing on the idea of how dialogic relationships exist among different forms
of speech, emerging not only from individuals but also from among social groups and mass media. We refer now to
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 89

narratives as tools mediating these dialogic exchanges when children learn to tell stories in multiple contexts and using
multiple discourses.
Again Bakhtin’s work on how characters in a novel acquire their own life, independent of the author who created
them, is particularly relevant to understanding videogame narratives, which are created by an author but activated by the
play of a gamer. Thus the game narrative is open-ended and, as in the case of Dostoevsky’s characters, far removed from
a closed, objective and logical world. This is in contrast with a narrative that has a monologic design. As Bakhtin writes,
“In a monologic design, the hero is closed and his semantic boundaries strictly defined: he acts, experiences,
thinks, and is conscious within the limits of what he is, that is, within the limits of his image defined as reality;
he cannot cease to be himself, that is, he cannot exceed the limits of his own character, typicality or temperament
without violating the author’s monologic design concerning him. Such an image is constructed in the objective
authorial world, objective in relation to the hero’s consciousness; the construction of that authorial world with
its points of view and finalizing definitions presupposes a fixed external position, a fixed authorial field of vision.
The self-consciousness of the hero is inserted into this rigid framework, to which the hero has no access from
within and which is part of the authorial consciousness defining and representing him—and is presented against
the firm background of the external world.” (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 52)
In a monologic videogame, then, a story hero acts following the author’s logic, leaving little room for his own
activity in a fantasy world; for the player in this sort of game, there is little room for the creative processes and the
transformation of self-consciousness. In contrast, Tomb Raider is a dialogic game in that the heroine acts in the external
world to achieve her own goals, involving the player in an imaginary world and allowing him/her to share the emotions
of the game’s main character.
One of the polemics in videogame research concerns the relationships between games and narrative. There are two
main approaches: that of the Ludologists, who prioritize the rules of the game, and of the Narratologists, who consider
the fiction itself as the first focus of interest. With respect to this debate, the contributions of Juul (2005) are relevant,
who suggests that one can answer in different ways the question of whether games tell stories, depending on what is
understood by the term “narrative”. Juul describes six different senses of this term as it has been used in the specific
context of videogame designers and theorists. These meanings differ from one another according to the way in which
relationships among events are established in the general framework of the story. According to this author, a first set of
definitions seems to focus on the idea of “event” and the ways in which relationships among events can be established:
“presentation of events” “fixed and predetermined sequence of events”, and “specific type of sequence of events”. From
this perspective, the videogames rules that support the activity for the gamers are the focus of research. By contrast, a
second set of definitions are rooted in the notion that narrative embodies fictional themes and thus represents the way
we make sense of the world. Writers emphasizing similarities between games and narratives have focused on these
interpretive, sociocultural dimensions.
Jenkins’ work (2006, pp. 672–673) aims to bridge these two approaches with the following set of principles:

• “Not all games tell stories”; for example, graphical games such as Tetrix.
• “Many games do have narrative aspirations”; for example, they do that by tapping the emotional residue of previous
narrative experiences.
• “Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive ”; that is, there is more than one privileged way to build and elaborate
stories.
• “The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story”; factors which have
little or nothing to do with storytelling per se are emphasized; for example, those which are highly dependent on
specific communities of players.
• “If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories”; for example,
the way in which TV and games tell stories are not the same.

Jenkins also introduces an important third term into this discussion: spatiality, arguing for an understanding of game
designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects:
“Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic
principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly
90 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character’s movement across the map. Their resolution
often hinges on the player’s reaching their final destination (. . .). The organization of the plot becomes a matter of
designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist’s
forward movement towards resolution”. (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 678–679)
This idea is particularly relevant to this study, since the opening and closing of spaces for the characters in the Tomb
Raider game is an integral part of the narrative.

4. Modes of inquiry and study design

This study is based on a qualitative analytical perspective based on narrative and ethnographic approaches
(Anderson-Levit, 2006; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006; Hollinngsworth & Dybdahl, 2007; Rogoff, Topping, Baker-
Sennett, & Lacasa, 2002) and includes a micro-ethnographic analysis of multimodal discourses (Gee & Green, 1998).
We have presented in detail elsewhere the steps that we follow in the generation of information and data analysis
(Del-Castillo, Garcı́a-Varela, & Lacasa, 2003; Lacasa, P., Reina, & Alburquerque, 2002).
In this project we act as participant observers, using both classical techniques (field/work diary, photography,
compilation of materials produced by participants) audiovisual data (audio and video recordings), digitalization of
all the recordings, and computer programs during the process of information processing (Atlas.ti 5.067). We also
emphasize the importance of organizing the collected data according to temporal criteria.
Following the methodology of previous studies, the analysis was carried out in several phases, guided by the
following principles: first, our units of analysis are not isolated individuals so much as activities organized according
to cultural principles and taking place in particular social and historical environments in which participants look for
specific goals that make sense of their activities, and that are interwoven, in turn, with social and cultural processes.
Secondly, in order to analyze patterns of activities we treat the contributions of every participant as being mutually
dependent as well as dependent on the context in which they arise.

4.1. Sources of data

We conducted our research in seven two-hour sessions of a multimedia workshop in a Spanish public school with the
participation of the teacher and 11 boys and 10 girls, who were in their third year of primary education (8–9 years old).
The pedagogical aim was to develop critical and narrative thinking in the children, using videogames as educational
tools in the classroom. The activity culminated in the production of a play, followed by the children’s publication on the
internet of their reflections on the workshop experience. The joint introduction of videogames, theatrical representation
and Internet publication was motivated by the principles that, first, the classroom demands a combination of different
resources that are not mutually exclusive but rather, complementary; and second, that introducing different symbolic
codes helps to generate a critical consciousness, in that the children take into account an immediate audience, in the
case of the theatre, and a remote one when they published on the Internet. We also anticipated that the fact that the
videogame was a violent one would create educational situations that would allow critical reflection. This reflection
was structured in two moments: first, after they were playing the children reconstructed specific moments of the game,
helped by the teacher in a whole group situation; second, they discussed their own theatrical performances.
Table 1 illustrates the main activities that took place during the workshop sessions, the classroom contexts and the
main material collected for analysis.

4.2. Principles and processes of analysis

Our data included video and audio records (a total of 17 audiotapes, 10 videotapes) and the written diary documenta-
tion produced by researchers and children. A narrative reconstruction of each session was produced by the researchers,
focusing on the main goals of the participants and their use of videogames and other semiotic tools in the classroom.
Once the workshops had been completed, all the video recordings were segmented using Atlas.ti. This allowed
successive moments in the classroom to be defined; these were subsequently transcribed in order to explore the
children’s and adults’ activities as related to specific goals and supporting several pedagogical strategies. We used this
software to analyse the classroom sessions, to study the video game’s “walk through”, and to examine the film narrative
in order to explore how the main characters are presented in the children’s narratives.
Table 1
The workshop’s activities, audio and video recordings and other materials
Session Context Date Classroom activity Audio and video recording Other material

1 Ordinary classroom: individual 8/05/2002 “My preferred video-games”, a Audio #1–4 Children’s texts about their
work and whole class group general discussion preferred digital game
Voting to choose the video-game Video #1–2

P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

Writing about “my preferred
video-game”
2 Computers room: small group 10/05/2002 Playing “Tomb Raider Audio #5–6 Video-game: “Tomb Raider
and whole class group Chronicles” Chronicles”
Writing about the game Video # 3A–3B
3 Ordinary classroom, using an 15/05/2002 Reading children text Audio # 7–9 Voting ballots to choose the video
electronic projector: small groups game
Talking and writing a story about Video # 4
Tomb Raider
4 Ordinary classroom: whole class 17/05/2002 Continuing the story Audio # 10–11 Small groups theater’ script
group and small groups
Playwriting Video # 5
Choosing main characters
5 Ordinary classroom: small 22/05/2002 Theatrical representation Audio # 12–13 Pictures
groups and whole class group
Video # 6
6 Ordinary classroom, use an 24/05/2002 Looking at other children’s web Audio # 14 (Teacher interview) Texts including main conclusions
electronic projector: whole class pages. -16 for the web page
group Planning their own web pages Video # 7
7 Computer room using an 31/05/2002 Looking at their own web pages Audio #17 web page
electronic projector: whole class prepared by the research team
group Main conclusions Video # 8

91
92 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

5. Participants’ voices and narratives during the workshop

The presentation of our results focuses on three specific aspects that reveal different dimensions that influence the
use of videogames as semiotic and educational instruments. First, we detail how the utilization of videogames in the
classroom is closely related to the goals of the participants; in our case, the children, the investigators and the adults.
We also examine the way in which they can be used to facilitate the construction of narratives in different situations
and, finally, we examine how children edit a web page in order to describe, with other children in mind, how they had
been using videogames in the classroom.
With respect to the participants’ goals, adult goals gradually come to be shared, but only at particular moments.
In light of our previous discussion of Bakhtin, we found that a polyphonic dialog can be difficult to achieve in the
classroom because the participants had his or her own goals that cannot always be shared with other people. Even
more, with respect to Olson’s work (Olson, 2003), we also found that at the beginning of the workshop the relationships
among participants seem to be marked much more by the roles that each of them were playing in this institutional
context than for their own feelings or embodied thoughts, as personified in multiple subjectivities.
Fig. 1 shows three clearly differentiated phases in the course of the workshop, all of them closely related to different
forms of activity: the videogames, the theatre and the production of a web page. The first phase can be regarded as
an expressions of the voices and goals of the investigators, while the second is much closer to the teacher’s voice,
when everybody was engaged in the theatrical representation. The third phase reflects teacher and researchers’ shared
interests in the children playing the role of text authors to be published in the web page (Table 2).

5.1. Playing, telling and writing about games

During the first three meetings of the workshop, the boys and girls played Tomb Raider with the aim of writing
a fairy tale based on the story of the game narrative on the school’s web-site. Three types of interests, expressed by
different voices, were present in the classroom: the researchers were focusing on the potential of videogames as tools
for literacy learning; the teacher was concentrating on those games as instruments to support children’s complex ways

Fig. 1. Main phases of the workshop.

 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 93

Table 2
The participants’ voices during the workshop
Playing, telling and writing about The investigators negotiated with the teacher the introduction of videogames in the classroom. We
games (Sessions 1–3) wished to introduce instruments designed for leisure time activities into the school. The children
spoke and wrote during the first three meetings about their favorite videogames and also played and
reconstructed the story of the game with the aid of a video projector.
Preparing a theatrical representation: The teacher, who was much more interested in body movement than in the process of constructing
planning, acting and reviewing narratives, supported the preparation of a script that the children would later perform silently by
(Sessions 4 and 5) using the movements of their bodies (miming) as a way of expressing themselves.
Publishing about games and theatre The researchers took control of the class, telling the children about the publication of their reflections
on the school web page in a web page. The teacher also shared this voice and collaborated during the editing process.
(Sessions 6 and 7)

of thinking and the pupils simply wanted to play the game. We will try to illustrate these goals by analyzing some of
the classroom conversations.
Let us first examine the voice of the researcher in the following dialogue. We will see how she seems to be worried
about introducing the children to new contexts in order to learn new literacies. This conversation can be segmented
into three main parts if we focus on its content: (a) The first part is related to the role of the Internet; the researcher
is exploring the children’s ideas on the topic of Internet literacies (1–11); (b) then there are the children who begin to
relate writing to everyday life outside school. This takes place (41) just after a question is introduced by the researcher
about people who write on the computer (41–50); finally, the theme of writing in the Internet returns (52).

The researcher tried to address the tasks of reading and writing in electronic media specific activities that take
place outside the walls of the school. This conversation shows how multiple voices are present in the classroom even
when all of them are rooted in a world that is external to the school. The children, together with the investigator, are
discovering several uses of writing related to their own individual experience. Following Bakhtin (1999), then, we
94 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

can say that multiple voices are interwoven into everyday experience and in the subjectivity of each of the speakers.
Every person expresses her/his experience in everyday life and gives different meanings to writing. For example, the
investigator tried to share with the children her opinions about the value of writing on the Internet; the children, who
live in another daily reality, refer to other uses of writing: their parents write budgets on the computer or they can
write to their friends using Messenger.
After the researcher’s intervention, the teacher introduced her own perspective to the children by explaining that
they would be working with videogames. Following Olson (2003) we can interpret the teacher’s voice as an expression
of her institutional role.

After a conversation in which the children explained which were their favorite games, the teacher made it clear that
the proposed task was going to turn into something more academic, as we see in Transcript 4.

This fragment reflects some conflict between the voices of the children and the teacher. In response to the proposed
academic writing task, one of the children proposes a less academic alternative. The teacher and the researcher accept
her proposal and give the children the option of choosing between the two tasks. Relationships between adults and
children are mediated by the role they play in an institutional context (Olson, 2003).
But let us return to the classroom. After the introduction to the topic, the children were taken to the computer room
to play. From the researcher’s perspective, the children were out of control, as we can see from the following field
note extract:
It is the beginning of the second session. The children are in the computer room I remember perfectly that what hap-
pened surprised me very much. I will never forget it. “They” were “chipped”. Probably they did not realize why they
were using videogames at the school, I do not know. Perhaps they were amazed because they could use videogames
at school. Looking at this tape (the video recording of the session) my intervention shows that I was really angry,
I wanted to control the class because it was impossible that the teacher could not even say a single word.
This situation can be interpreted from three different perspectives in relation to the institutional roles that participants
are playing during these first sessions of the workshop.

• First, the children’s approach to the task; in this it is not clear that the children had a clear goal for the session or
that they understood why they had gone to the computer room with a videogame, and in particular that it was not
just to play.
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 95

• Second, the voice of the researcher, who tried to control the class and to convey to the children that they should both
play and learn from the video game. At that time she was adopting the institutional role of a traditional teacher.
• Finally, the situation of the teacher, who always had been capable of controlling the situation and, in this case, was
surprised by what happened in the computer room and did not know how to react.

As soon as order had been restored, the teacher explained to the children the task for this specific session of the
workshop: first at all, they were going to play for five minutes and then they would tell the others their opinions of the
game. To sum up, using a Bakhtinian vocabulary, the classroom was a polyphonic context where many voices were
interwoven one into each other, sometimes in a dialogical way but on other occasions establishing monological and
institutional relationships among participants.

5.2. Preparing a theatrical representation

It is important to emphasize that the idea of preparing a play for the theatre came from the teacher. This goal was
immediately adopted by the children and at that point the researchers adopted a more passive role than at previous
moments of the workshop; for the time being, they observed more than they participated in the class.
Given our theoretical framework, we need to point out that new literacies related to specific semiotic domains were
acquired when the children worked in specific situations in which they need to use multimodal codes of expression
(Kress, 2003). For example, when children were playing the game they needed to understand visual information and
act according to specific paths suggested by the game designer in order to produce the story (Grodal, 2003). On the
other hand, when they produced a fairy tale using the electronic projector, only one of the children was really playing
and physically interacting with the game. However, almost all the children in the classroom needed to be conscious of
the game story, as they talked with the teacher, and anticipated what would be happening on the screen, and then wrote
their own story or play. If we regard children as both actors and spectators when they prepare a performance about Lara
Croft, we notice that they are placed in new and different contexts to build narratives than when they were developing
the story orally or interacting and controlling the characters playing the videogame. These new situations, like the
previous ones, help to them to develop new ways of knowing, telling and learning; building on the concrete nature of
the dramatic act; the physical expression of a role, is always expressive and communicative (Schonmann, 2006, p. 109)
We now focus on the second phase of the workshop, which centered on the theatrical representation, beginning with
a revision of the story. We explore the processes of discussing, planning, acting and reviewing the performances that
took place in the classroom when the children worked in small groups to present a performance taking as its starting
point the story of Lara Croft inspired by the videogame and reconstructed freely by each of the groups.
Looking at the conversations during the fourth session of the workshop we see the teacher helps the children to
develop a story about Lara Croft that they will use as a basis for the script of their performances. These classroom
conversations show that reconstructing a story from a video-game is not a simple task. The following transcript
illustrates many of the problems that had appeared in previous classes.
96 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

The children do not seem to have a big picture of the plot, but just refer to specific elements of the game. Almost
all of them relate to the virtual spaces appearing in the screen, which connects with Jenkins’ comments on the role of
space in the organization of videogames stories: it is clear that for the children, Lara Croft’s activities in the labyrinth
and garden are important elements of their story.
Perhaps because it was so difficult to reconstruct the story in a traditional way, the teacher decided to read a synthesis
of it that she herself had prepared.
Below, the teacher reads the story that they had written the day before and gives some instructions to the children.
Perhaps thinking about the plot for their performances, she tells them that they need to write it.

This fragment introduces the teacher’s synthesis. It is interesting to see how she begins (line 3) by saying “once
upon a time”. This is much more like a fairy tale than a theatre script or a videogame narrative.
During this class we observed that the teacher was gradually losing control of the children who seemed to lose
interest and to be bored. Perhaps for this reason the teacher introduced a new task, to look for the main characters
in the videogame. Each of these was written up on the blackboard and each character was introduced by his or her
defining characteristics.

Following the teacher’s prompt in transcript 7, above, the children named the main characters and they described
them. They were the dinosaur, the butler, the child, the tiger, the villain and of course the protagonist, Lara. The children
had formed four groups, each of which would organize its own dramatic presentation. The teacher distributed the
characters among the children by writing the names of the characters on slips of paper which the children drew at random.
In this context it is interesting to consider the relationships between videogame and theatre at the moment of writing
a story (Carlquist, 2002). Within the game, the experience of manipulating elements within a responsive, rule-driven
world is the primary phenomenological feature that uniquely identifies computer games as a medium (Mateas & Stern,
2006). Looking at theatre as a specific mode of representation that uses particular codes of expression (Brecht & Willett,
1957/1992), the activity of actors is related to emotions generated by the characters’ adventures; for the children, this
involved identifying themselves with the main characters of the game in order to play specific roles.
In the following paragraphs we focus on the interaction between action manipulation and character development in
the analysis of the way in which children adopted roles, wrote the plot and represented the story. Two aspects of the
scripts written by the children stand out clearly: first, the reference to the kind of actions that the actors need to portray;
second, the way in which these actions are distributed among the main characters. Both aspects introduced the children
to a symbolic world that was also expressed by means of oral and written discourses. There are important differences
among the scripts of each of the groups with respect to these points, as illustrated in the following two examples.
Focusing on the script that appears in Fig. 2 we can see that every action was assigned to specific figures who are
also clearly identified numerically. For example: Lara is always the first (1◦ ), and the actress who plays this role is
Irene; in case of the characters who represent the tigers, the actresses are Laura and Ester and they are always identified
by the number (2◦ ). This numerical reference refers to the order in which the roles were distributed and noted by the
teacher. The children were able to use this temporal sequencing as an instrument that helped them to organize the
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 97

Fig. 2. Theatre script a workshop group.

activities of the play. It is also interesting to note that the children attributed an action expressed in a verb to every
character. With respect to the form in which the script is written we see that a line is assigned to every action; only
on one occasion is there the concept of Lara–Irene both attacking and defending herself. This script is an example
of multimodal literacy, not just written language. That is, the text was produced after a multimodal interaction with
different media that included game play and its on-screen sounds and images, as well as theatre/dramatic representation.
All these modes structure and support their written text as they appear in the screenplays:

This script that the children wrote reflects that fact that they are developing a multimodal universe that reflects the
one they experienced as they played the game. In the first place, it is easy to recognize the movements of Lara Croft
through multiple screenshots when, as the principal character of the story she shows her physical flexibility, expressed
through her movements through digital space. Focusing on this aspect, the children refer to her movements in many
different terms; for example, “she runs”, “she attacks”, etc. (see lines 1–4 and 10). The sound is also present in the
98 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

children’s words, especially when they refer to Lara shooting (lines 5, 10 and 11). Finally, and focusing on the text as
a unit, it brings into view all the digital spaces across which Lara is looking for friends or enemies.

5.3. Acting and reviewing the content of the play

Let us now look at the theatrical performance, as it was performed by the children during the fifth class session.
They brought tunics, pistols and other objects to use as costumes and help them in the characterization of their roles.
When we focus on the video recordings of their performances, we can see strong similarities among them despite the
differences in the written scripts. Fig. 3 shows one of the scenes that was constantly repeated.
The following description of this performance (Fragment 8), made by one of researchers after a first view of the
video, illustrates a recurring feature: that “every character that appears falls down”.
This is the performance of group 2, which at a first glance was very similar to that of group 1. They took a long
time for the preparation. Because we had just one fixed camera we cannot see exactly what are they doing. In
one of the corners there seems to be an actor or actress with a tray of drinks.
It begins as before; the children follow her walking on all fours, turning around. Lara shoots directly and the
other girl falls down. Lara continues to be followed; there is someone dressed like a tiger. The child in the mask
comes out, they all are falling down (the same as in the previous one). There comes out a child wearing slightly
yellow make-up (ninja) and faces Lara, and he also falls down. A girl comes out with a mask and falls down too.
Someone says aloud to him that he should get up, which he does and they return the shots. A tin or something
falls and the child falls down too. Lara continues with the pistol. Each one who comes out is shot and falls down.
There are two possible explanations for the predominance of the nonverbal and physical in this performance. First,
mime may be a more naı̈ve kind of representation than traditional theatre (Lust, 2000) and it may have been easier for
the children to adopt this specific way of representing a story. A second and much more plausible explanation is that
the game that inspired the play had almost no dialogue, so that the use of mime was directly suggested by the game. To
understand the process by which mime was suggested by the Lara Croft video game, it may be useful to think about the
new kind of literacies related to the videogames design as proposed by (Jenkins, 2006) when he focused on the game
as a narrative architecture. In these new texts, each episode becomes compelling in its own terms. Adopting this model,
Lara Croft’s acrobatics around the physical environment of the game and shooting some characters might suggest that
focusing on specific actions of the game is the most compelling aspect for the children. If that is the case, we can
interpret the children’s performance as a micro-narrative, a simple sequence of preprogrammed actions, through which
the main event of the narrative plot is introduced. From this point of view, it could be suggested that the most relevant
aspect of the game narrative for the children is the fact that Lara needs to avenge the murder of her father by only
shooting the people who killed him or who appeared to be enemies. In that sense, what was difficult for the children
to express verbally at the time that they were playing, did appear in the performance.
Looking at these data and in order to be more explicit about the role of videogames as educational tools to learn
about narratives, let us now summarize the main features of the stories that children developed as they work with
the game. Three successive phases need to be differentiated: (1) Oral reconstructions of the game were predominant
during the first part of the workshop, as particular difficulties appeared at that time and the sentences follow one
another without much coherence; as we show in transcript 5 the children were focusing on Lara’s physical activities
in several different places (for example, a maze or a garden). (2) Writing the story as a script for the theatrical
representation seems to be a good strategy that enabled the children to express a much more coherent schema of the
plot (see Fig. 2); at that point, the texts evidence a multimodal interaction with the game. (3) Finally, the performance
helped them to understand and express the essential part of the plot; we suggest that meta-reflective processes were
sequentially present in the classroom activities. In sum, focusing on these multiple and diverse classroom situations,
all of them organized around the game, we consider videogames as a new classroom tool that helps to combine new
and established forms of literacy when they develop narratives. We say “established” because during oral, writing
and performance activities children and adults were looking for the plot of their story, we say “new” because they
approached this plot by using multiple codes in a multimodal approach.
Let us once more return to the classroom. When all the performances had finished, the children, teach-
ers and researchers participated in a critical discussion about them, focusing much more on the content than
the format. The reflections generated by the performances were complex. A new distance between children and
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 99

adults’ voices was being created, probably due to the different degrees to which they addressed the concept of
violence.
In the following extract, we see that once the teacher had tried to create a suitable climate in which to develop the con-
versation her main focus was on prompting the children to articulate and understand the presence of violence in their per-
formances. Her question prompt, however, was rather general (turn 1): “Can someone tell me what we have been doing?”

We see that the girl who responds does not take up the topic of violence the teacher has in mind. In the following
fragment, the teacher pursues this issue explicitly, passing without comment over all other characteristics of the
performance introduced by the student. That is to say, the teacher neither alluded to the fact that all the theatrical
representations were very similar, nor to the idea of having used oral dialogue or not, nor to the way in which the
children had been involved in their characters. She was only interested in discussing an abstract idea of violence. By
introducing specific questions she tried to return to how Lara Croft was constantly shooting her adversaries (line 1).
However, the children did not seem to be conscious of this; in their opinion what repeats itself is that they are “tigers”
(lines 3 and 4). Finally one of the children referred with a gesture to the act of killing (line 8).

With respect to Bakhtin’s critiques of “rationalistic” moral education (Bakhtin, 1990), we can say that at the
beginning of the conversation the teacher missed opportunities to engage the children in an active, dialogic role during
a discussion of the specific gestures of the actors, objects and other concrete aspects of the performance (Pilar Lacasa,
Del-Castillo, & Garcı́a-Varela, 2005). If the teacher had foreseen this, surely the discussion would have much more
centered on topics closer to the children’s everyday life. Moreover, we can infer from the teacher’s introduction of a
topic the children did not respond to or generate that she was surprised by the way in which the children reproduced
what had happened in the fictional world of the game.

5.4. Publishing a discussion of games and theatre on the school web page

We now examine the final phase of the workshop, in which the children produced and edited the web page. This
activity was motivated by the researchers’ view that the creation of a web page would help the children to reconstruct
their activities as a narrative, an activity related to our research goal. Second, bearing in mind that since we were trying
100 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

Fig. 3. The children represent Lara Croft’s story.

to develop literacy abilities related to the use of new technology it was important that the children should reflect on
their own work and turn themselves into senders of messages that distilled their own experiences (Kress, 2003). Thus,
besides helping the children to understand the communicative dimension of multimodal speech, writing was viewed
as a powerful instrument for making them conscious of their own activities.
The web-site editing process had three main phases: (a) planning the children’s own page on the basis of specific
models developed by other children from the same school who had been working on a similar task with the research team;
(b) re-developing the specific content of the writing process, related in this case to the video-game; and (c) considering
the role of potential audiences, looking for attractive ways of presenting their introduction and conclusions.
This last phase of the workshop began in the computer classroom. One of the investigators projected images of other
web pages produced by other children at the same school on the wall. This relates to Jenkins’ notion that enacting,
reciting, and appropriating elements from pre-existing stories is a valuable strategy in the development of children’s
cultural literacy (Jenkins et al., 2006). Let us examine one of the first dialogues.
In the following transcript, we focus on how the web page was planned and how adults help the children. Many
elements introduced by the researcher were subsequently adopted by the children as their own initiatives; for example,
how the children were participating in other workshops (paragraph 5), were introducing texts and drawings in their
own website (paragraphs 3 and 7), and considering that part of their work had been done as they chose how they wanted
to do it (paragraph 4).The researcher also invited the children (paragraph 7) to tell other people the story of what they
have been doing during her workshop; that is, we are facing a new way of teaching narratives, focusing on how the
author and the content of the text are related. That is, children writing about their own activities and experiences during
the workshop, they will be express themselves in a “first person” voice.
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 101

After several alternatives for the web pages had been considered, the teacher encouraged the children to synthesize
what they had discussed, especially when they were looking for the web page’s title.

Considering this conversation, it is clear that the teacher has introduced violence as a topic, and the children
are following her. The previous conversation suggests two main comments. First, the title is expressed in very
abstract terms, the children introduced the term “violence” in a very general sense, not including any concrete
reference to the video-game, their own activities in the classroom, or even the performance. What this sug-
gests to us is that, classroom conversations often situated the children far from their everyday life. Secondly, we
observe in the transcript explicit references to games as “bad”, a reflection of attributed values. From our point
of view these earlier conversations could be interpreted in terms of a stronger teacher voice than of the children’s
opinions.
Returning to the children’s activities during the workshops, Fig. 4 is a composite of all of the main pages that were
published on the school’s website by the children (see translation in Appendix A).These include the contents and ideas
that the children had being discussing during the conversations that we have shown above.
As we can see, the web-site consists of four quite different sections, each of which deals with what seems to be most
significant for the children. We immediately see that on the first page, the children speak in the first person plural, which
means that they identify themselves as a group (“We are a group of boys and girls”). They also speak directly to the
possible readers (“we want to tell you”), introducing them to the topic of the workshop (“Violence in videogames”).
On the second page “Our videogames”, the children decided to put in their drawings of their favourite videogames and
to explain how the Tomb Raider video game was chosen for the workshop. The text also refers to their attitudes and
feelings during this time; for example, “it was fun”. The page entitled “Tomb Raider II: The play” shows the pictures
of each group. There, they also explain how they organized themselves for the final show. Finally, they decided to
include a page of conclusions.
As we look at the content of these web pages, the texts suggest that the children, helped by their teacher and
the research team, were capable of reflecting on their own work, through a meta-cognitive process, but that they also
transmitted their opinions, expressing them via a single shared voice. In the text that they wrote to introduce themselves,
two main topics appear: on the one hand, it is clear that they have a clear consciousness of their audience; e.g. they
said: “On this page we want to tell you everything that we did in the workshop and how we discussed violence in digital
games”. On the other hand, they introduce explicitly the goal of the text, implying a high level of meta-cognitive
processes; the same idea that they introduce as a general conclusion also appears in the text. Finally, with regard to
the rest of the webpage, we see that they elaborated a sequential reconstruction of their activities during the workshop
expressed in a narrative voice, e.g. they referred explicitly to “the first day”, or the day they were acting (“The day
when we were acting the play we had a lot of fun”). In general terms, this new narrative, written about their own
workshop can even be interpreted in terms of a generalization process of the narrative skills that they practiced when
they wrote about Lara Croft, the heroine of the game.
102 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

Fig. 4. web page of the workshop.

6. Brief conclusions and educational impact

The goal of this paper has been to explore how videogames as semiotic and cultural tools support the creation of
innovative educational settings and contribute in the growth of oral, performed, and written narratives in the classroom.
Our first conclusion when we explore the role of videogames as educational tools relates to the importance of con-
sidering the perspectives and roles that children, teachers and investigators assume as participants in the institutional
setting of their classroom. For the children, videogames are elements of their everyday life related to their free time and
therefore foreign to what they experience in the school. For the teacher, videogames are also a means of entertainment,
to which she finds it hard to assign an educational meaning. Researchers focus on videogames as tools around which
innovative educational settings can be created in order to learn about narratives. In this light, we see that introducing
into the classroom a tool that belongs to the popular culture beyond the school gates assumes that all the participants,
adults and children, can successfully make joint efforts to unite their own subjectivities by joining their voices together.
Our research shows that this is not an easy task. In fact, one of the main problems that emerged during the workshop was
that it was difficult for participants to be cognizant of their own goals and of how these were interwoven with the role
that the institutional context assigned to them. It was difficult for the children to make their role as gamers in everyday
life compatible with their role in the classroom, where the videogame took on a new meaning when it was introduced
as an educational tool. There were also disjunctures between teachers’ and researchers’ understandings and goals. One
the one hand these can be explained by differences between their institutional identities which led to discrepancies
in their understandings of their perspectives in the videogame project. For example, the direct responsibility of the
teacher for what happens in the classroom allows us to understand why she tried to make the children conscious of
violence that was present in their performances. This focus was at odds with the researchers’ desire to see the dialogical
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 103

potential of the videogame work to be exploited. It is clear that it is difficult to coordinate researchers’ and teachers’
goals, and that such partnerships, to be successful, require extensive dialogue between teacher and researchers ahead
of the work in the classroom, in-depth knowledge of the video game and the articulation of the explicit goals for the
teacher’s and investigators’ activities.
The second conclusion of this work shows that the use of media such as digital games complements the use of
other written or audiovisual methods and permits the development of multiple literacies in the classroom. For example,
by playing the game and re-elaborating it with the teacher, scripting and performing the Lara Croft play, and then
publishing their own experiences on a web page, children learned how to control multiple ways of talking, writing,
understanding and producing images and sounds to communicate with other people. For example, when they were
playing the game, and needed to interpret the various clues that enabled them to follow the game, they often completed
this task together. By this means, they learned how to interpret images and sounds and to act in response to messages
involved in audiovisual signs. Moreover, by using a written language they learned to develop narratives in the form of
a theatrical script and later to transform their own interpretations of the game into a performance by acting and bodily
expression. Finally, in designing their web page they need to use some academic habits, e.g. summarizing, discussing
and generally trying to be in contact with the audience of their written texts.
From this perspective we can explore how authors locate themselves with respect to their own texts (Bakhtin, 1999)
and how the way in which they approach these texts is limited to specific conditions that depend on the media and on
the context where the text was produced. That is, playing and writing stories from videogames was an interactive and
creative process that was simultaneously constrained by the game designers. Similarly, children’s freedom to talk in
the classroom about the game creates and elaborate oral reconstructions were limited by the aims of the teacher and
researchers.
Our third conclusion refers to the way in which it was possible to construct narratives using Tomb Raider. In this
respect we view games as cultural instruments of the development of stories. They work in much the same way as fairy
tales which children heard from adults and then learn to retell in specific contexts and with other members of their
communities. In the workshop two types of narratives emerged. The first was closely related to the videogame and was
built up of a series of successive moments and formats. For example, the children began to construct a oral story with
the aid of the teacher, who was interpreting it as a traditional fairy tale. Later, they wrote the script for their performance.
At that stage the children created a new narrative and script in conversations with other children and by reworking the
elements provided by the designer; by doing so, they developed the story around people acting in different spaces. The
stories show, as Jenkins (2006) points out, the alternative aesthetic principles that characterize videogame structure.
In them, the children privileged spatial exploration over plot development, following the privileging of the story space
rather than traditional time-based narrative structures in Tom Raider itself. These special structures were reproduced in
the children’s performance in our classroom, e.g. when they were representing the Lara Croft activities going around
a big table and shooting enemies. Videogames thus open up new ways to explore how to build narratives that depart
from traditional academic literacy practices. The second type of narrative is the one that was constructed in relation to
the planning and production of their web page, where children and adults reconstructed the story of the workshop by
using multiple codes, texts and images. The web page and the play script were all written using the third-person, and
involved temporally sequenced activities orienting the actors’ performance. The web page, written in the third-person
plural, followed a classic academic narrative structure: after introducing themselves to the audience they described how
activities happen during the workshops and summarized in a main conclusion. Both narratives allowed for a dialogic
relationship with the video game, the first one reconstructed its content; the second one re-elaborated the activities that
children carried on the basis of the game.
Our final conclusion relates to the learning process that took place during the workshop. By introducing videogames
into the classroom we wanted the children to critically use specific media which were present in their everyday lives.
From our perspective, at least two moments during the conversations reveal meta-cognitive process involved in their
learning activities when they related to the videogame content. First, they became conscious of some elements of the
game that were part of its narrative; for example, the activities of Lara Croft, a popular heroine and the main character
of the game; e.g. running, attacking and defending herself. Moreover, all these activities make sense in relation to
the goals of the heroine that they made explicit during their final presentations through the movements of their own
bodies; from this perspective it would be difficult, playing in an entertainment situation, for the children to manage
to develop a complex representation of the aims of the main character and the strategies she follows to achieve it. All
these activities, taken as a whole, contribute to the development of the plot of their performances. Second, aided by
104 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106

the teacher and the researcher, they were conscious of specific social problems related to violence, and of the moral
dimensions of Lara Croft’s activities.
Finally, and opening the door to new studies, we have seen that the introduction of videogames into the classroom
turns out to be a challenging task for both children and adults. We do not claim that videogames turn the class into a
“cybercafé”; the school has always been characterized as a setting in which teaching and learning take place according
to planned and conscious processes, at least on the part of adults. In this study, collaboration between children and
adults allowed the classroom to gradually turn into a complex environment of voices that gradually expressed both
conflicts and shared goals. To achieve a convergence between personal or collective goals was thus not an easy task,
e.g. the relationship between teachers and researchers was sometimes difficult, and some problems also appeared when
the children and their teacher were not always in agreement; e.g. the children were wanting to play at the beginning
of the workshop, making it difficult for their teacher to maintain the attitude that is expected in the classroom and in
other contexts in which people try to share the meaning of their activities. In contrast, in other situations the classroom
is much closer to a polyphonic context; e.g., the children and the researchers all accepted the teacher’s suggestions
when she proposed that they perform Lara Croft, all of them contributing with their own ideas and activities to this
common goal. When the tasks related to the website were suggested by the researchers, the rest of the participants
work to achieve this common goal by participating and making their best efforts.
We hope that by working together in similar challenging situations, we will contribute to a definition of innovative
educational settings in which children can learn more easily to use their everyday entertainment tools to via a reflective
and critical approach.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Alexandra Jaffe for her support, challenging ideas and suggestions, and for making this paper legible.

Appendix A. web page of the workshop

“We are a group of boys and girls at Henares School and we have been participating in a workshop about violence in
digital games. On this page we want to tell you everything that we did in the workshop and how we discussed violence
in digital games. We want to show you our digital games to tell you how we made a play about Tomb Raider and came
to our final conclusions ”
“On the first day of the workshop we talked about our own digital games. Each of us told the whole class which
one he or she liked and then we made a drawing and wrote about what was appearing in this game. Later, the whole
class voted to choose one of these games. The game that we chose to work on at other meetings of the workshop was
Tomb Raider II”
“During the workshop, we were working in groups to write a play in which we acted out what was going out in the
video-game that we had chosen to work with. The day when we were acting the play we had a lot of fun and we took
photos of ourselves. Here you can see some of them.
“On this web-page we are going to tell you our opinions of violence in computer games and about the workshop.
At this moment we are thinking about this. Soon you will be able to read it.” (See Table A.1).

Table A.1
Transcription Notationa
Symbol Name Use

[text] Brackets Indicates the start and end points of overlapping speech.
= Equal Sign Indicates the break and subsequent continuation of a single utterance.
(#of seconds) Timed Pause A number in parentheses indicates the time, in seconds, of a pause in
speech.
(.) Micro-pause A brief pause, usually less than 0.2 seconds.
// Barras Indicates falling pitch or intonation.
 P. Lacasa et al. / Linguistics and Education 19 (2008) 85–106 105

Table A.1 (Continued )

Symbol Name Use

++ Question Mark or Up Indicates rising pitch or intonation.

’ Comma Indicates a temporary rise or fall in intonation. Pausa al final de una frase,
mas que un signo de entonación.
- Hyphen Indicates an abrupt halt or interruption in utterance.
>text< Greater than I Less than symbols Indicates that the enclosed speech was delivered more rapidly than usual
for the speaker.
<text> Less than/greater than symbols Indicates that the enclosed speech was delivered more slowly than usual
for the speaker.
◦ Degree symbol Indicates whisper, reduced volume, or quiet speech.
ALL CAPS Capitalized text Indicates shouted or increased volume speech. Indicates the speaker is
emphasizing or stressing the speech.
underline Underlined text Relevant for the analysis
::::: Colon(s) Indicates prolongation of a sound.
* Asterisk Noise
** Double Asterisk Depth noise
(text) Parentheses Speech which is unclear or in doubt in the transcript.
((italic text)) Double Parentheses Annotation of non-verbal activity
a Jeffersonian Transcription Notation is described in Jefferson (1984).

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