Gaming Grammar

About Gaming Grammar

Gaming Grammar is a digital game designed to support foreign language grammar teaching and learning. Learning grammar is important because it can help us understand how we put words together to make phrases and sentences. However, many people find learning grammar a bit dull or difficult, particularly if they are learning grammar in a new language. Gaming Grammar makes grammar practice engaging and motivating, through a suite of mini-games practising a range of grammar features in French, Spanish, and German.

The game teaches grammar through listening and reading practice called form-meaning mapping, a research-based teaching approach that makes grammar essential for understanding meaning, in line with the MFL Pedagogy Review recommendations. Each mini-game is based on a spy mission and practises a pair of grammar features. To complete each mission successfully, the player must crack the code by learning how to understand the grammar features.

The Digital Creativity Labs was funded by the EPSRC to develop and evaluate the first set of mini-games in French. With additional funding from DfE, NCELP has worked with the Digital Creativity Labs to expand Gaming Grammar to Spanish and German, add more mini-games to practise a wider range of grammar features, and build an intuitive interface for teachers.

Using Gaming Grammar with your class

We have created a template letter for parents / carers, which provides information about the game and how it will be used. Please complete the letter for your setting and send it home to parents / carers, prior to using Gaming Grammar with your students.

Template letter

Creating a Teacher account

With a Teacher account you can:

Create Classes for your students to join
Track the performance of your Classes and download reports of their in-game performance
Create Lessons (customisable collections of levels from the game) and assign Lessons to one or more of your Classes.
View which students within each Class have completed the Lesson and the percentage of levels completed successfully.

A School Code is needed to create a Teacher account. To request your School Code, please complete this form: Gaming Grammar – Request for school code’ to provide us with the name of your school, town and postcode.

Please note: All teachers within one school can use the same school code to set up their teacher accounts.

Mini-games overview

Our overview documents list the mini-games currently available in French, German, and Spanish, and the grammatical structure(s) practised in each mini-game. The mini-games primarily use vocabulary taken from the NCELP Schemes of Work (SoW) and top-2000 most frequent words in each language. We have also indicated which NCELP SoW week(s) each mini-game maps to.

These documents will be updated each time a new mini-game is released.

Gaming Grammar overviews

Accessing Gaming Grammar

Gaming Grammar user guide

For more information on how to use Gaming Grammar, please view our User Guide:

Gaming Grammar User Guide

Research with Gaming Grammar

As well as supporting teaching and learning, Gaming Grammar will also help us to understand more about grammar learning. The Gaming Grammar team (which includes researchers from the University of York and University of Reading) will be analysing data from the game to better understand the effectiveness of this learning tool for supporting foreign language grammar learning. The research data will include players’ responses and response times while playing the game and information about players’ age, gender, and first language. Any data downloaded for research purposes will be pseudonymised by assigning each player a code number and no identifying information (e.g. names or email addresses) will be downloaded.

For more information, please view the Gaming Grammar privacy policy (link below).

Data privacy policy

The Gaming Grammar privacy policy can be viewed here:

Gaming Grammar Privacy Policy