Action research: why implement a game-model for EFL?

We have approximately 200 students distributed unevenly among 7 levels with most (approximately 60%) being in the bottom three levels.  This is surprising given that the vast majority of our students have been studying English since primary school or even pre-school.  Why, then, is their level of English so low?

There are many possible reasons.  We posited that the students were simply unmotivated.  We therefore set out to find out what motivation was and how to create, or at least stimulate it in the EFL classroom.

There are two main groups of researchers who seem to be most interested in motivation and who actually have a great deal to do with each other: motivational psychologists and game designers.

Games seemed interesting at first simply because of the statistics.  In 2013, $21.53 billion dollars were spent on videogames.  59% of American play video games, divided between 52% male and 48% female players, a combined 61% of whom are under the age of 35.  Games are an interesting study because there is no (or rarely any) real-world benefit to playing games, yet people are collectively spending millions of hours playing them.  Therefore, one can assume that there is something inherently motivating about games.   Is it possible to harness this in the classroom?  Many are certainly trying, but what methods are succeeding?

Motivational psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan studied motivation from an interesting angle: they started by asking what the factors are without which motivation cannot happen.  Self-determination theory, as they call it, posits that the three most important aspects of motivation are autonomy, competence, and relatedness.  The first concept, autonomy, suggests that the antithesis of motivation is micromanagement; in class this would translate to teachers imposing assignments and deadlines without regard for the learning styles and preferences of their students.  Games, on the other hand, would seem to offer players a certain freedom of choice, beginning with whether to play at all.  Once the player is in the game world, gameplay progresses through a series of choices: whether to go left or right, whether to jump, crawl, run or hide, whether to slay the enemy with a gun, grenade, sword etc., or not to slay the enemy at all.    

This point actually turned out to be more important than all that follow.  Most games lie on a spectrum from linear narratives, such as early versions of Super Mario Bros in which the player literally moves forward in a single direction overcoming obstacles along the way until he eventually reaches the castle of princess Peach; to games with a single goal but many ways to achieve it, such as beating the other team in football, to non-linear games such as Grand Theft Auto in which, though players have missions, they have considerable freedom to complete quests in the order of their choice and to pursue side missions if they so desire.  While the elements mentioned below were fairly easy to implement, this seemed to be the sticking point, as I will show.

Competence refers to the feeling of being able to succeed at something, which may be difficult in a system where students are graded on a curve and points are deducted from 100.  Games, on the other hand, offer such things as experience points and levelling up.  If you die (fail) you can “respawn”, or simply keep on trying until you achieve your goal. 

The term relatedness is used to describe the feeling that one’s work matters to others; again, this is difficult when the only person who reads students’ assignments is the teacher, and then not out of interest but in order to correct it.  Many games, in contrast, are highly social, whether they involve raiding teams or a friendly Scrabble game against your mom. 

My action research began with the following question: How can we design an EFL curriculum for university students at Universidad de los Hemisferios in Quito, Ecuador based on game-like learning (Salen, 2004) in which students have greater autonomy, competence and relatedness (Deci and Ryan, 1985) than in “traditional” EFL classes (ie: the lecture-course book-test model) they are accustomed to?

My first answer was inspired by a non-linear game model, my second by a linear game model.