Mette-Ann Schepelern remembers when she first heard a curious sound coming from her son’s bedroom.

Someone was speaking fluent English loudly, peppered with mysterious slang. To her surprise, it was her 9-year-old Danish son.

Schepelern and her son Carl live in Copenhagen, where English lessons begin in the first grade. To become fluent, a child would need to practice several hours a day — which Carl did, but not in front of a textbook.

Carl was playing World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online game with more than 10 million players and available in 11 languages, none of them Danish. To survive, players must communicate both out loud and through typed commands with others in their “guild,” or team.

When Schepelern learned her son was playing games, not practicing his school subject aloud, she had some reservations. But now that Carl, 13, is at the top of his English class and has even become his teacher’s assistant, she’s glad she didn’t confiscate his mouse and keyboard.

“I could feel he really enjoyed it and had so much fun speaking English like that,” she said.

Increasingly, people are turning to games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty to learn and teach second languages. Multi-player online games allow for an immersive experience with native speakers, while raising the stakes — if you can’t communicate, it’s game over.

“Games are so effective at teaching language,” said Yolanda Rankin, a research scientist with a doctorate in computer science at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga.

Rankin tasked a class of ESL students with playing the game EverQuest II. One group played the game by themselves, while another joined teams with native speakers. The students on teams scored significantly higher on vocabulary tests than the solo players.

“The magic ingredient was having those native speakers,” she said. “(The students on teams) were using those vocabulary words to collaborate to complete the quest. That made it more meaningful.”

Dionne Soares Palmer, a freelance writer in California, wrote her PhD dissertation on learning Spanish playing World of Warcraft. (Note to graduate students everywhere: she spent 10 hours a week slaying orcs and called it “research.”)

After eight months of raids, healing spells and quests on a Spanish copy of the game with a guild on a server in Spain, she had jumped two levels in a Spanish placement test.

“In a language class, they’re the native speaker and I’m the total novice. But in the game, we’re all working together. I’m the hero, not the language student,” Palmer said.

Plus, the pressure of being part of a guild forced her to think on her feet. “If you’re in the middle of a fight, you can’t go look up a word, or else you’ll die,” she said.

Still, it’s rare to find teachers using online gaming as a language tool. Todd Bryant, technology liaison for the foreign language department at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College, used World of Warcraft to teach German in a first-year college course. He found that having a task to accomplish motivated his students and sharpened their skills.

He got a few funny looks from other professors in the hallways, he said.

“A lot of them seemed amused, but there was no mass revolt,” he said. He added that one problem with using games to teach is that they’re not structured enough for traditional learning.

“The game is just too unpredictable. You can’t say, ‘OK, now we’re on Chapter 3.’ It’s just too free-form.”

Carl admitted, with a laugh, that one of the first English words he learned was “loading.”

Now, he’s trying to work on his accent and improve his grammar. It turns out gamers take grammar quite seriously.

“When you make a little mistake, they’re like ‘oh no, you didn’t!’ and correct you all the time,” he said. “It’s annoying … but I have actually learned a couple things from them.”

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Carl has met people all over the globe through gaming — not just World of Warcraft, but Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Halo — and hopes to move to Canada or the U.S. for university.

His mother still sometimes complains that he’s gaming too much. “She says, ‘You need to get your homework done!’ But I always get my homework done,” he said, grinning.

“I think I’ve gotten smarter from gaming. I really do. I think I get smarter every day.”