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The term “gamification” emerged in the early 2000s (Marczewski, 2012) and was later defined as the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). From its origins in the business community, it has spread to education, as educators explore its potential to enhance the learning process, both in terms of results obtained and the enjoyability of the learning process for students.
Learning vocabulary, especially academic vocabulary, may sometimes be perceived as tedious by English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students. However, recent years have seen the introduction of online vocabulary games, both computer-based and as smartphone applications (Garnes-Tarazona, 2018). Some subsequent research has found that computer game-based approaches to foreign language education in real-world classrooms can improve transferability of learned vocabulary (Franciosi, 2016) and students generally have a preference for vocabulary games (Yip & Kwan, 2006). Other recent research has explored the potential of gamification in the vocabulary learning process by introducing gaming elements, such as points, badges and levels, into teaching practice (Hasegawa, Koshino, & Ban, 2015). In an East Asian context, a project by Kohnke (2020) to design a vocabulary app has found that most trial users felt more motivated and stimulated by gamified elements as opposed to more traditional learning approaches. They placed importance on good design, simplicity, ease of mobile use and gamification elements, and one such trial user commented “When I see that my friends have new high scores on Facebook, I feel like playing and beating them” (Kohnke, 2020, p. 22). However, observations of the content of smartphone app stores suggests that these online vocabulary activities tend to be mostly marketed at general vocabulary rather than that used in academic contexts, whether it be discipline-specific or useful across disciplines.
Seeing this as an opportunity, the reviewers considered their own context in the language centre of a large Sino-British university in eastern China. They proposed to develop an online game activity intended to aid students’ learning of the Academic Word List, also known as the AWL (Coxhead, 2000). In doing so, the reviewers purchased a relatively new Moodle plug-in called Level Up that aims to enhance the gamification potential of the platform. The activity’s end product and students’ reaction to it will be reviewed and discussed.