Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes (Mar 2021)
GAMIFICATION IN LANGUAGES FOR MEDICAL AND HEALTHCARE PURPOSES CLASSES: THE OUTCOMES OF A EUROPEAN SURVEY
Abstract
Gamification techniques have long been applied by the business and marketing world to encourage explicit behaviours and increase customers’ incentive and commitment. However, in the past ten years in education, especially in language teaching and learning the benefits of this technique have also been realized as it provides an alternative to engage and motivate students in the classroom. The motivation and involvement of today’s digital generation can easily be increased by the integration of various digital tools and applications providing further opportunities for students to collaborate and communicate as well as to obtain extra scores, which can later be turned into grades or even exam grades. This methodology and pedagogy assist language teachers in finding the balance between achieving their teaching goals and meeting students’ needs. Therefore, in education today it is crucial to be resilient and flexible and be able to modify and adopt instructional methods and activities in order to meet the needs of the digital generation, and be ready to respond instantly to emergencies, or global pandemics, as it was and still is the case with COVID-19. The present paper aims to provide an insight into an international research that was carried out in the spring of 2019 involving 547 medical and healthcare students from seven European Higher Education institutions. The goal of the study was to gain some understanding of the use of gamification techniques applied in Languages for Medical and Healthcare Purposes (LMHP) classes as well as to shed light on students’ attitude towards its use. As the results suggest, gamification tools are highly applied in medical and healthcare education across Europe, and gamifying LMHP classes contributes to students’ motivation, provides them with a genuine sense of achievement and enhances their communication and collaboration skills. The authors conclude that the success of gamification lies in making the learning experience engaging and interactive, irrelevant of weather we are applying this methodology during face to face classes or online sessions due to COVID-19.
