Visual novels: video game-style storytelling as a multimodal medium for language learning and instruction

Abstract

While media from comics to videos, and even video games have been increasingly adapted for the foreign language classroom, the use of "visual novels", a genre of video games and style of storytelling, has generally been overlooked despite being popularized in Japan beginning in the early 1990s. Visual novels are a form of multimodal media that incorporate text, visuals, and sound, and the present thesis will strive to demonstrate its potential for the language classroom, particularly in the context of Japanese as a foreign language. This thesis will do so by presenting an overview of visual novels' simple structure, attesting to its relative ease of creation compared to other types of video games, showcasing various studies that suggest multimodal media have benefits for language learning, proposing accessible creation tools and materials such as Microsoft PowerPoint, as well as suggesting ways visual novels can be adapted for the classroom in reading, listening, writing, and speaking.