Although there are some advantages of QA, personally I don't like QA much because after (or while) I played QA I got eye strain. I didn't know why, but compared to liveMocha or twitter activities, I felt easily eyes' fatigue. As a result, I couldn't concentrate on learning for even an hour because of my eye tiredness. I think that it is not just for me but others. Especially, it may be harm for young learners to play QA (kind of game) for a long time because their eye are easily influenced by enviroment.
Also, some learners just play for a plesure not for language learning, so teacher has to go the round and pay attention to student's activity. In my opinion, learners should use QA as their outside activity because no matter how learners use well, they can't improve their language skills if they don't know basic knowledge. That's why grammar teaching or other teaching should be focused on in class.
Since I'm not gamer (who loves playing game), I'm not interested in QA much. However, for gamer QA is very interesting, and it even motivetes them. If teacher understands individual preferences, she can give learners a lot of options to study language. Some prefers QA, but the others don't prefer it. This situation always exsisted in class.
It's interesting you bring up the point about eye fatigue. I am particularly weary of this too since I have poor eye sight to begin with and do get eye sore and shoulder pains related to the eye sore if I use something like QA for a long period of time. I also like your idea of using QA as an outside activity. I think this would be one way I would implement it in an L2 classroom setting. I just wonder if there is anything like this for Japanese learning...
ReplyDelete