This study describes an integrated use of simulation/gaming in an English for Academic Purposes class, analyzes its benefits and drawbacks, and suggests how the technique would apply to other specific contexts. To write an argumentative essay, international students brief and run a simulation on gun control. They respond to a poll, debate, watch a movie, write letters to editors of local newspapers, read, and play bingo. They also debrief by discussing their performance and working with cartoons. Although the approach failed to provide enough accuracy to generate satisfactory organization and documentation, the level of motivation, metacognitive awareness, and topic authority point positively toward the technique. Student writers searched, organized, planned, and executed the knowledge they co-constructed. If there had been more time to debrief, other form-focused practice could have further improved the final results.

Taking an experiential approach to language development, this article links gaming to the language development of a 10-year-old deaf child under speech therapy. Specifically, it examines face-to-face interactions between mediators and the child, during 1 year of gaming in clinical encounters. To do so, it codes data by means of interactional variables (intentionality and subjectivity/intersubjectivity) and textual variables (function versus content words). Results show that gaming yielded affordances in the use of strategic behavior and syntax by the child. They also reveal that repetition is a recurrent communicative strategy that contributes to meaning making, culture learning, and discursive involvement. Furthermore, role reversals by the child and the mediators suggest that gaming played a constitutive part in the development of the boy's subjectivity/intersubjectivity—ultimately, in his development of Portuguese as a second language.

This article integrates major outcomes of a simulation-based approach to teaching foreign language and links it to learners’attainment of strategic competence. According to existing research, curricula inspired by the approach seem to promote favorable conditions for language acquisition. If language teachers design simulations that help learners to assess the characteristics of the language situation, set communicative goals, plan responses, and control the execution of their plans, they help learners to become strategically competent and pave the way to communicative competence.

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O presente estudo reflete criticamente sobre a formação do professor de LE à luz da condição pós-método, com o intuito de contribuir para a ação de programas de formação.  Dentre outras questões, ilumina a importância de o professor em formação construir percepção sobre o contexto e de si próprio como agente da própria formação.  Para tal, primeiro trata de aspectos filosóficos presentes no contra-discurso da condição pós-método, em seguida destaca a conscientização sobre o papel do contexto no ensino-aprendizagem de línguas e finalmente  apresenta uma heurística reflexiva com potencial de guiar as ações dos cursos de formação.