Adding to the seemingly never-ending stream of self-improvement titles flooding Wii game shelves is My Word Coach, an Ubisoft Montreal-developed game the subject of which is one of humankind's greatest achievements: The written word. And while it may not be the greatest thing ever to happen to video games, it is entertaining enough to keep most players pleasantly occupied for 15 or 20 minutes per day over the course of a few weeks.

Copping a design similar to games like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, players are led through a variety of vocabulary building and spelling improvement activities to build up their Expression Potential -- the game's way of measuring a person's word skillz. Progress in each activity is tracked in graph form, allowing you to gauge your improvement over time and check how well you're doing compared with other people playing the game on your console.

Like all games in the mind puzzle genre, the educational potential of My Word Coach's games fluctuates. For example, Word Shuffle, which involves matching words with their correct definitions, uses plenty of interesting and esoteric words and actually has the potential to help you develop your vocabulary. And Missing Letter does a good job of testing the player's ability to fill in omitted letters to complete lengthy (and sometimes obscure) words.

However, Block Letters, a vaguely Tetris-like game that sees players clearing blocks by spelling out words from a list beside the play area, and Word Cereal, in which players unscramble the letters of a word floating in cereal, have more to do with pattern recognition and quick reflexes than learning new words.

Teaching capabilities aside, many of the challenges are hampered by My Word Coach's overdependence on the Wii-mote's motion sensitive functionality. Split Decision, for example, requires players to awkwardly twist their wrists left and right to reveal conflicting definitions to given words. Pressing left or right on the d-pad would have been a far simpler and more comfortable means of control. Ditto for Safecracker, which makes the act of selecting letters a tedious challenge as you tilt the remote to make an on-screen dial rotate through the entire alphabet to select each character.

But, warts and all, My Word Coach still has the potential to appeal to players who enjoy other word games, like Scrabble or Boggle. Besides, wouldn't you rather your kids suffered a little carpal tunnel syndrome and learn a few new words rather than just blasting away at aliens? (In all seriousness, your ten-year-old will learn more useful information from My Word Coach than just about any other console game around). And if by chance you happen to be part of a family of word lovers, you'll probably get some mileage out of the multiplayer mode as well, which allows up to four players to go head-to-head in spelling and word definition challenges.