Gamification in language teaching

Abstract

Digital games have aroused the interest of researchers in the area of language teaching as a learning resource for students, either indirectly, when the student plays for fun and ends up learning the language incidentally; or directly, when the student plays with the explicit purpose of learning the language, using, however, a gamified activity to simulate a digital game, with the inclusion of points, badges and leaderboards (PBL). The aim of this article is to investigate the influence of gamification on language motivation, considering students’ reactions to and engagement in gamified activities. Based on the perspective of both Digital Literacy, as a broader theoretical framework, and Flow Theory, as a methodological basis, we strive to explain how students are involved in the activities. The data were generated from a quanti-qualitative approach, and derived from a gamification authoring system (ELO) which provided gamified activities to be used in the EFL classes, group interviews, observation sessions of students carrying out gamified and non-gamified activities, a sociodemographic questionnaire and a Likert scale application. The results showed that the most influential aspect of students’ engagement was content relevance, followed by the didactic design of the activity, and, thirdly, PBL-based gamification. To conclude, in order to engage students in gamified activities, we must go beyond PBLs, including pleasure, persistence and resilience, to be stimulated by the language learning activities.