Gamify your language teaching process!

The term, gamification, according to “7 Things You Should Know About Gamification”, is defined as “the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.” In language teaching, the teacher uses games as pedagogical tools to achieve teaching objective. The games are engrossing enough to attract students in order to facilitate their learning process. By developing intrinsic motivation, gamification provides a systematic medium to maximize language-learning efficiency.

I never thought that games could be educational, so I started trying an “escape the room game”, named The Heart of Tota. I tried to finish it for a long time, continually clicking every single object and hoping a little progress. At last, I have to resort to its walkthrough, but at that time I lost all my patience and was exhausted. Because there is not too much vocabulary involved to finish this game, I started to think about other language learning objectives, such as communication using the target language. I would use pair work in finishing the game of this kind. By interacting with each other in target

languages, students would solve the mysterious problem cooperatively. They will scaffold and negotiate to share their ideas and the teacher, as an expert, will provide graduated hints, within their flow or comfortable zone, as defined in A Comparison of Computer Game and Language-LearningTask Design Using Flow Theory.  The major goal for students is to communicate as much as possible, so a walkthrough will not be provided explicitly. Only when they are stuck after adequate communications, the teacher would pinpoint where they are and present solutions based on its walkthrough.

The assessment of whether they have achieved the communicative objective could be impractical in that they could use body languages instead of discourse in their interactions. However, when the teacher’s advises are needed, they have to report where they are and what is the problem, by summarizing previous and current situation. In this way, the teacher could monitor their progresses in person.