Serious Games as a Resource in Teching the Language of Economics, Business and Finance to Specialist and Non-Specialist Students

The usefulness of graphic and audio-visual products in teaching/learning environments has been long since acknowledged, in particular in specialised fields, where comics have been demonstrated to increase the readers’ engagement and understanding of the processes described and the language used to describe them. However, these positive effects are even greater when the products exploited are more interactive and – while relying on graphic art and audio-visual media – require the active participation of students. The means to achieve this was identified in videogames, whose potentials in educational settings are countless. The aim of this paper is therefore to present, albeit very briefly, a serious game which is currently being developed at the University of Parma (Italy) by the author and her colleagues from the Computer Science Department for students attending courses from the Department of Economics, Business and Finance. Both the target and the activities created for this serious game were selected and developed after a thorough analysis of the needs of the student population attending Parma University and, as the paper shows, they were conceived as a means to support students in their learning process and help them develop the skills they are likely to need once they enter the profession of their choice. As this paper emphasises, the exploitation of a virtual environment in which students can be first guided by their teachers and, later on, can act autonomously, appears particularly beneficial, and can become extremely motivating at more than one level: students are able to complete the various activities according to their time schedule, repeating it as many times as they want/need, they can revise some of the main notions acquired during a course, consolidate the specialised lexis, practice their communicative skills, assess their reaction time, as well as – in the case of multiplayer games – exercise their ability to cooperate with other people. Since the realisation of this product is very time consuming and requires a great effort in terms of human resources, only partial and piloting sessions have been carried out so far. Yet, even from these limited results, it is evident that this type of innovative didactic approach leads to a more motivating learning experience and thanks to its reliance on both verbal and visual language often makes specialised notions and the language used to convey them easier to master. Furthermore, the game also fosters the development of interpersonal skills, often deemed essential in the economic and financial fields and – through the exploitation of some of the most recent developments of Artificial Intelligence in the scope of Natural Language Processing – encourages students to rely also on plain English, training them to translate intralingually highly specialised notions into simpler forms which could be understood by the majority of receivers. As such, this serious game is expected to improve not only the players’ performance as students but also their professional one, since the tools students will need to complete a gaming session successfully will then be transferred to their experience in the real world.