Students in Oman have negative attitudes towards learning English. An action research where a gamification implementation including various elements such as a leaderboard, badges, and a progress bar was conducted. Three instruments were used to investigate how gamification could increase the learners' motivation: motivation tests, interview protocols, and complete participant observations. The motivation tests were analyzed using Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The interview and observation data were analyzed using a thematic coding qualitative method. Results revealed that over the two cycles of implementation of the gamified approach to learning English, 92% of students demonstrated an increase in their motivation to learn English. The interviews revealed the specific aspects of the gamified approach that contributed to this increase. Extrinsic motivation was replaced by intrinsic motivation. This leads to implications for a future study where the gamified approach to teaching could be trialed across different classes and subjects in the same school.
TopIntroduction
Over the past decade several studies on motivation have revealed that learners’ motivation is an issue that affect most teachers in language teaching (Dörnyei, 2003; Scheidecker & Freeman, 1999). The Ministry of Education in the Sultanate of Oman pays due attention to teaching English language at high schools and deploys significant resources to understand the issues learners are facing when tackling the language. According to Al-Mahrooqi (2012), students at high schools in Oman have negative attitudes towards learning English due to the motivational environment at schools. Al-Mahrooqi states that this lack of motivation results in lack of care towards learning the language.
In the researchers’ context of a high school in Oman, it was observed that a lack of motivation resulted in carelessness in doing homework, poor participation, aversion to doing tasks in the activity book, lack of writing new vocabulary in the exercise book, late submission of assignments, and even sometimes punctuality issues. This brought the researchers to the point where a change was required in term of the teaching environment to increase the learners' intrinsic motivation towards learning the English language.
Gamification has been defined widely as the integration of game elements such as leaderboards and points in non-game environments for the purposes of increasing the users’ experience and engagement (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 1). Gamification has become a popular technique used in different fields and contexts to motivate people to be engaged in targeted behavior and activities. Similarly, in the field of education, gamification has been recognized as a powerful tool to improve the students’ motivation (Bytheway, 2011; Connolly et al., 2001; Hamari et al., 2014). Additionally, the implementation of gamification in the educational environments has attracted the interest of different researchers (Burston, 2013; Vassilev, 2015; Minovic et al., 2012). This justifies the need to understand the various perceptions of gamification that exist among the previous studies conducted, as a mean to resolve the researchers’ situation.
Several theories of motivation fit into the category of gamification. To resolve their issue, the researchers selected the Self-determination theory (SDT) and the Flow theory of motivation, as they are both well-established theories that justify gamification as a potential tool for increasing the learners’ intrinsic motivation.