Active spoken mastery of a foreign language all too often remains an illusive wish on the part of language learners. There is a tendency to seek the causes of non-fluency and accurate speech outside the classroom, for example, too little involvement, interest and time investment on the part of learners. In this article Manuela Macedonia asserts that the problem is attributed primarily to the type of exercises that are employed to process foreign language input. Traditional transmission of morphology and syntax by way of rules, and practising such rules via written exercises, does not lead to spoken language, for with this type of practice the retrieval of learned material is too slow and often incomplete to enable successful speech. While games in language and SEN instruction are not new, in this article their targeted usage based on cognitive/neurological evidence is proposed in order to proceduralise declarative knowledge and thereby to elevate accuracy and fluency to a level that enables real-time speech. Key words: foreign language teaching, mastery, games, declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge. Games and foreign language teaching MANUELA MACEDONIA Introduction The language learning landscape in continental Europe over the past two decades reveals that the path to active mastery of a foreign language is long and rocky. Somewhere along the line, learned grammar and vocabulary should merge into sentences and so empower language learners to speak. Such merging should occur at a tempo that matches native speakers in order to enable communication and to avoid a loss of interest or a switch to another language on the part of the communication partner. A typical negative example is a waiter in a foreign country who lacks the time and patience to give the tourist’s laborious language production a chance and so responds in English. Foreign language should be available as a retrievable inventory of useful resources in the memory of learners to enable them to communicate in real time; only then have they achieved fluency in the foreign language. Understanding a language, knowing its rules and retrieving vocabulary amounts to progress toward fluency, but cannot be equated to active fluency. This sounds banal and self-evident. However, in practice we observe that learners accrue much metaknowledge about the language, yet even after years of study cannot speak fluently. Why does conventional language instruction attempt to transmit foreign language as theoretical knowledge, and why does practical application remain so difficult? Certainly there are multiple answers to these questions, for example, that grammar is essential and forms the structural basis for a certain level of accuracy in language production. However, we can seek different kinds of answers in the reality of unsatisfactory achievement: learners fail to recall vocabulary, sentence formation takes too long, learners are uncertain about word endings, etc. All this leads to inhibitions rather than to speaking! But why is vocabulary not available for retrieval? Why does it take so long to form a sentence? Why are learners uncertain about word endings? And how are these interrelated? Consider native speakers. They speak effortlessly, yet possess theoretical knowledge of their language only if they study such in school. A native speaker does not simply inherently know about grammar, that a word happens to be a verb, or which morphological forms this verb has. The native speaker retrieves every word and structure instantaneously and so can communicate in real time. While my experience over the last 15 years has been rooted in foreign language education in schools, universities and adult education, games could likewise prove a viable instrument in the instruction of pupils with special educational needs. Certainly SEN educators have already paved new ground far beyond conventional pedagogy, and games are nothing new in this field. However, I propose the concept of games as tools for the targeted proceduralisation of declarative knowledge (see below). I invite educators to develop appropriate games for the specific needs of learners with SEN, as modern neuroscientific research indicates that proceduralisation functions in the same way for all learners (see Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun, 2002). G A M E S © NASEN 2005 Support for Learning • Volume 20 • Number 3 • 2005 135