Gamification and the listening skill

Abstract

The current research has a quantitative approach. On the flip side, listening skill is one of the most important basic skills in the English language but unfortunately, many teachers in schools, colleges, or educational centers do not take it into account, or think that it is not an important skill. Moreover, if a student does not develop this skill in a good way, he or she will not be able to understand what the teacher wants to transmit, and if a student does not understand what a teacher says, he or she will not be able to learn, and this is something worrying in students' learning process. The purpose of this research is to determine the influence of gamification in the listening skill. The subjects of the study were 18 first year students from CTT de los Andes Language Center. On the other hand, the current work has a pre-experimental design, because the researcher only used one course of students in order to apply the experiment in which a standardized KET CAMBRIDGE test was applied as a pre-test to evaluate students' listening skill. Then, students were exposed to gamifying activities to develop the listening skill. Finally, a post-test was applied to the same group of students to verify whether the previously applied activities were effective for developing the listening skill. The results showed that gamification strategy has a positive influence on students' listening skill, because they obtained higher scores, and especially they improved in the listening for gist skill.