Tactical Language & Culture Training System
The Tactical Language & Culture Training System is a computer-based learning system to help people quickly acquire a functional knowledge of foreign languages and cultures. Each Tactical Language and Culture training course focuses on "tactical language", i.e., language and culture relevant to particular tasks and missions.
The Tactical Language and Culture Training System supports a combination of interactive lessons and interactive games. The lessons focus on skills relevant to common everyday Situations and tasks, and the games give the learners the opportunity to apply those skills in realistic game scenarios. Cultural knowledge is integrated throughout, and includes knowledge of nonverbal gestures as well as norms of politeness and etiquette in the foreign culture. The continual feedback provided by the software, as well as the computer game context, help to keep learners focused and motivated. They also help learners to develop confidence in their communication skills so that they are more able to apply them in real life.
The Tactical Language and Culture Training System started as a research project at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute in 2003, under funding from DARPA. The project was a winner of the 2005 DARPATech Significant Technical Achievement Award, recognizing DARPA technology projects that are Providing benefits to the US military. The project has since been transitioned to a private company, Alelo Inc., and its government services subsidiary Tactical Language Training LLC (TLT). In collaboration with USC, Alelo has developed a Tactical Iraqi course for Iraqi Arabic, and is developing a Tactical Pashto course and a Tactical French course. Alelo continues to develop content for the Tactical Iraqi course, and is developing courses for civilian use. United States Special Operations Command, US Marine Corps, and the US Army are major development sponsors.
User responses to the Tactical Language and Culture Training System courses have been uniformly positive. Users like the fact that it helps them acquire practical communication skills that they can input to use. Users of Tactical Iraqi who had previously been deployed to Iraq frequently report that they learned more in one day of work with the system than they had learned during their entire tour of duty in Iraq.
There has been some controversy AbOUT the game in the serious games development community, as to whether working on a military-funded videogame related to the Iraq occupation, even one with ostensibly admirable objectives, is morally defensible. For example, Gonzalo Frasca has argued that it is a propaganda game.