Game not overexperienced language teachers' self-reported beliefs about the use of gamification in the foreign language classroom

Resumen

Game not over: Experienced language teachers’ self-reported beliefs about the use of gamification in the foreign language classroom. Language teachers have been using a wide variety of strategies and game-like activities in their classes to make both teaching and learning foreign languages engaging and more fun. Since the introduction of gamification in education, language teachers have shown interest in adopting it in the foreign language classroom to address issues related to attitudes, activities, and behaviors, such as class participation, collaborative and student-centered teaching practice, assignment completion, facilitating assessment and fostering students’ creativity, autonomy, and learning habits. Teachers are agents of change and play a crucial role in the process of understanding and adoption of new teaching practices, especially technologically-related ones. Therefore, it is important to understand the role teachers and their cognitions play when implementing innovative approaches in their classes for the first time. A qualitative, multiple case study was designed around the use of gamification of five experienced foreign language teachers from five state language schools in Catalonia, Spain. The teachers who participated in the study, completed a teacher professional development course on gamification during the academic year 2016/2017 (1*), and were asked to gamify in their classes and present their gamified interventions at the end of the course. The study focuses on teachers’ self-reported beliefs about the process of gamifying in their classes and the practical implication of implementing a novel teaching approach for the first time in their classes with their adult students. It also looks the influence of the teacher professional development course on gamification on their gamification proposals and values they held for the gamification concept itself. According to Borg’s (2003) framework of teacher cognition (2*) pre- and post-gamification interviews were developed and conducted with the five teachers. Apart from the interviews, as main source of data, teachers’ beliefs were contrasted with their teaching artifacts (proposals and materials for the gamified interventions) as well as data from questionnaires conducted by the course organizers. Data was then coded, and a within-case and cross-case analysis was conducted. Results showed that although teachers had predominantly positive beliefs at the beginning and at the end of their gamified intervention, they faced similar difficulties when understanding the concept, adapting it to their set teaching program and the external factors, such as time and student availability. The teacher professional development course on gamification acted as a framework and a role-model for teachers when creating their gamified proposals and has provided teachers with a solid pedagogical content knowledge base on gamification. 1* The Gamelex project was granted in 2015 by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (EDU2015-67680R) to the University of Barcelona (IP: Dr. Joan Tomás Pujolà) 2* Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81–109. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444803001903