Open questions for consideration:

- What is game-based learning?

- What is gamification?

- What do we know about games and gamification in language teaching?

- Who is researching or teaching with games and play?

- Why be ludic?

- What are the hurdles to ludic teaching?

This forum will evaluate the educational and linguistic affordances enabled through digital and analog approaches to language learning based on creative activities and creative play.

Creative play is an intrinsically motivated, autonomous, and interactive process that has the potential to develop linguistic and meta-linguistic skills. Presenters will introduce innovative learning practices they have used to encourage learner autonomy and creative play in the language classroom and on learning management systems.

Presenters will outline the broad range of affordances game-based activities enable in language learning, including collaborative creativity, improvisation, risk-taking, and emergent language use. Presenters will introduce multiple perspectives on creative play in the learning process, including teacher and student experiences of play and game-based learning and design.

Presentations will shed new light on the cognitive and social factors that facilitate autonomous modes of creativity and collaboration in the classroom, as well as provide practice-based examples of materials and games used. In the forum, participants will have opportunities to discuss and reflect on their experiences of game-based language learning in pairs and small groups.

Participants will leave with practical examples they can employ in their own language classrooms. They will also gain theoretical insights that help them understand the educational potential of creative play, and build their own playful approaches to language learning in the future.