Story-Telling, Gamification, and Videogames: A Case Study to Teach English as a Second Language

Introduction

In recent decades the vertiginous development and spreading of new technologies has altered traditional identities and socio-cultural practices, and consequently has affected both the personal sphere—in aspects such as lifestyle, education and work—and the social one, by changing the terms of human interaction and behavior.

This transformation is possible due the creation of environments that challenge distance and time with the immediate availability of information and instant communication despite possible physical remoteness. Therefore, new dimensions where borders between the virtual and physical spaces are porous and that acknowledge no limit are created. This new era is frequently referred to as the “digital age”, “information age”, or “technoculture”(Hand, 2016, p. 4),, and for it “digitality can be thought of as a marker of culture because it encompasses both the artefacts and the systems of signification and communication that most clearly demarcate our contemporary way of life from others” (Gere, 2012, p. 12). The digitalization of our world is ubiquitous; therefore, the teaching field also finds itself under continuous strain for innovation answering transformations affecting classrooms everywhere.

Despite being capable, due to their demotivation, whether caused by external or internal factors, students of today might lack the necessary training that enables them to function as adults in tomorrow’s society, face the requirements of a highly skilled job market and the staunch competence required in a given professional role. Certain subjects become sources of frustration where low motivation regularizes and defines the outcomes of the learning process. In an attempt to solve existent problems of the schooling system, theorizations on the learner and motivation in the classroom attempt to go beyond the traditional classifications of the latter as intrinsic and extrinsic, and its valuation in terms of social and emotional conditionings. By investigating students’ engagement in the classroom, and by highlighting the apparent obsolescence and ineffectiveness of traditional schooling approaches (Lee & Hammer, 2011), a connection can be observed between these mentioned elements and problems of levels of cheating, disengagement from school, and with this, higher attrition rates. All things considered then, teaching a second language nowadays requires creativity, a great number of attractive resources, and distinctive approaches that attempt to intermingle old methodologies and new techniques that must be appealing for the learner who is placed at the centre of the learning process, and whose profile, of course, has changed too.

The new generations of children and adolescents inhabiting this world “have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a ‘singularity’” (Prensky, 2001, p. 2). At the very root of this uniqueness or disruption mentioned by the author as being typical of the new generations is the fact that these youngsters are “digital natives”, entire generations that “have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age” (Prensky, 2001, p. 1a). Contemplating all these aspects, digital literacy becomes almost a necessity “to be added to school curricula and even for new pedagogies that incorporate computer games” (Peterson, Verenikina and Herrington, 2008), together with other traditional subjects, such as mathematics, history, English, etc.