Studying the Effect of Gamification Strategy on EFL learners’ Reflective Thinking

Developments in the area of technology- enhanced language teaching and learning research have heightened the need to focus on the Gamification strategy and its effect on successful language performance and also on facing with challenging situations. This study tries to determine the effect of Gamification strategy on reflective thinking of EFL learners that is a thinking process aimed at showing the current situation of methods and levels of teaching, learning, and problem-solving skills. The current research sample has reached 124 homogeneous EFL learners (among 153) divided into the experimental group and the control group. To assess such effect, researchers have designed and applied a 16-session schedule in which an educational electronic game was used as the Gamification strategy and the reflective thinking of learners was assessed using Reflective Thinking questionnaire (Kember, Leung, Jones, Yuen Loke, McKay, Sinclair, Tse, Webb, Wong, Wong, & Yeung, 2000) in pretest and posttest phases. The results represented the existence of statistically significant differences at the level of significance (α = 0.05) between the intact group and the control group based on which reflective thinking of the experimental group increased during the course at the levels of habitual action, understanding, reflection, critical reflection, and total reflective thinking

Keywords:

Gamification , Reflective Thinking , Habitual Action , Understanding , Reflection , Critical Reflection , Language Learning