I need to remember to press the "Publish" button when I finish....

EDIT: I wrote this post on Saturday, and then apparently forgot to 'publish' it when I was done, and I didn't even notice that it didn't publish until this evening, lol.

I wanted to briefly talk about the topic of video gaming and the language classroom, since this is a somewhat new topic in language acquisition studies, and I have actually read a few studies on this topic over past couple years, but not for any research purposes of my own. However, all of the studies that I have read have been about how players can benefit from conversation/discourse-related aspects of gameplay. For example, Piirainen-Marsh and Tainio's (2009) finding that NNSs who repeat the words and phrases used by characters during cutscenes as they are playing the game shows that the NNSs are putting these words to use and analyzing them in a new context. This is really hard to explain without writing a huge wall of text about it, but it's a very interesting finding, in my humble opinion. At my previous university last spring, I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dr. Piirainen-Marsh on this paper, and got to see the some clips of her video data. I would like to say more about it, but I feel like I'm already getting pretty long-winded about this one study, so I'll just have to ask you to peruse the article yourself if you're interested in learning more.

Piirainen-Marsh, A., & Tainio, L. (2009). Other-repetition as a resource for participation in the activity of playing a video game. The Modern Language Journal, 93(2), 153-169. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00853.x 

Just paste the title into Google Scholar--it'll be the first hit.