WoW as an ESL tool? Well, that's one way to get "roflcopter" into the dictionary.

A recent article from The Journal suggests that online games could be effective tools for teaching English as a second language and that marketing them as such could increase game sales in China, Korea, and Japan.

In their presentation, Schneider and Zheng argued that the internationally popular MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) could be marketed more effectively in China, Korea, and Japan if it were run on English-as-a-second-language servers, which are accessible to players in Asia and the United States. Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of WoW, currently sells the Asian rights to the game to a Chinese company, which runs it on separate servers. Schneider believes that running the game on joint ESL servers could remove one of the greatest roadblocks to sales in that part of the world: parents.

Keep reading this at The Journal.