This introductory chapter provides the rationale for the book, as well as its organization. As part of the linguistic landscape, public signage provides glimpses of a culture and its changes. The ability to read signs is a practical skill essential for daily survival in the target language environment. But there seems to have been a general neglect of signs in the typical Chinese language curriculum, even at advanced levels of instruction. This book aims to rectify the situation.

1 Introduction

2 The Early Days of Serious Games

 2.1 Examples of Influential Games, 1970s to 2010

 2.2 The Emergence of Serious Games as an Academic Discipline

 2.3 Further Analysis of the Constituent Components in Game Models

  2.3.1 User Experience

  2.3.2 Learning and Learning Outcomes

  2.3.3 Game Characteristics

  2.3.4 Instructional Content

  2.3.5 Player Characteristics and Context

 2.4 Evaluation of Serious Games

3 Recent and Current Advances

 3.1 Examples of Influential Games, 2010–20

 3.2 Recent Progress on Serious Games as an Academic Discipline

  3.2.1 Recognition of the Need for Rigorous Evaluation

  3.2.2 Learning / Learning Outcomes and Twenty-First-Century Skills

  3.2.3 More Recent Taxonomies and Models

  3.2.4 Content

4 Looking to the Future

 4.1 New Areas of Development

 4.2 Technological Advances

 4.3 Learning Analytics and Personalisation

 4.4 Constraints on Serious Games

5 Conclusion

This chapter considers evaluation of student learning in a transformative classroom as assessing the degree of personal development: direct application, to near transfer, to transfer. Concurrent with these stages are three levels of emotional experience: memorable (emotional without insight), meaningful (emotion with insight), and transformative (emotion with insight, reflection, and change in behavior or attitude). These experiences can be positive or negative, with negative experiences being often found to be more formative. Examples are provided for teaching and testing on the basis of the intersection of these three levels of instruction and three levels of experience from an understanding of achievement, performance, and proficiency tests, along with the impact of testing on instruction – examples of both positive and negative impact of testing are given, and the case is made for aligning testing format and content with desired learning outcomes. Finally, a systematic flaw, of which testing is a part, in instructional system design that impairs formative assessment is pointed out, and suggestions are provided for integrating assessment into TLLT.

Chapter 5 focuses on the Design phase of the BLL development framework. This phase deals with macro-level structure and process. The design phase has two main purposes: identifying the characteristics of the target learners and the contextual factors surrounding them through a needs analysis. The chapter also establishes realistic course goals, achievable teaching objectives, and measurable learning outcomes at the course level.