A gamification proposal for Tourism undergraduates studying ESP

Enfoque

Active learning methodologies can be defined as the methods, techniques and strategies that are used in the classroom in order to promote students’ active participation and learning (Labrador & Andreu, 2008). Gamification has turned out to be one of the most popular active learning methodologies since it helps to increase students’ motivation (Contreras & Eguía, 2016; Oliva, 2016; Corchuelo, 2018) and improves students’ performance and a positive attitude toward learning (Huang et al., 2020; Murillo-Zamorano, et al., 2021).

The aim of this work is to provide a gamification proposal for an English for Specific Purposes course for undergraduate students of Tourism in a public university in Madrid. This proposal has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to improve students’ general linguistic competence; on the other hand, to enhance students’ communicative ESP strategies to fulfill their future tourism labor endeavors successfully.  To do so, students need to visit a total of twenty countries (Canada, United States of America, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Cameroon, Nigeria, Morocco, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Syria, Pakistan, India and the Philippines) in a dynamic and student-paced environment with the aim of motivating and engaging student in their ESP learning. Through critical thinking and autonomous tasks, students face unexpected situations and lead their own learning. They will encounter different activities to improve and practice their linguistic skills online while paying special attention to the different realities of the countries they are virtually visiting. Once students have fulfilled a task and received the corresponding feedback from the teacher, they will obtain some flying miles as a kind of reward that will let them fly to a different country. According to the number of miles, they will obtain a boarding card to travel to a nearer or farther destiny until they visit the twenty countries.

For this purpose, the importance of the so-called active learning methodologies in the teaching-learning processes will be first discussed, especially through the role assumed by the students in the processes. Subsequently, we will focus on gamification and its main aspects that make it a motivating methodology for ESP higher education undergraduate students. We will also explain the role of digital online activities in their learning process. Later, the gamified proposal will be presented and the main tasks that students need to fulfill will be detailed. Finally, the results and conclusions will be included.