The Effectiveness of Gamification to Enhance Writing Skills in English as a Foreign Language Contexts

Writing is a skill that can be challenging for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners to master; as a result, it requires a lot of instruction and practice with written assignments in order to become a satisfying activity for English language learners. In order to obtain the desired learning outcomes, it is vital to develop ways to make this practice more pleasant and beneficial. One such choice is to gamify activities for learners. The purpose of this study was to examine how gamification influences the growth of writing abilities. This study used a pre-experimental design and a quantitative methodology. Thirty-three Ecuadorian students took part in this study as participants. Additionally, eight sessions were used to gather the data during three stages: pre-test, interventions, and post-test. The Pre-test and Post-test were taken from the Cambridge A2 Flyers exam, and the written performance of the students was graded using a rubric. The researcher mostly used worksheets and writing exercises using a variety of tools during the intervention. The researcher also included gamified elements including extra points, badges, time limits, leaderboards, tasks, and incentives. Main findings revealed that employing gamified exercises, students’ English writing skills enhanced in areas of organization, mechanics, syntax, grammar, content, and writing process.