Can gamification in language apps be the key to taking your language learning to the next level? For those looking to improve their language skills, downloading language learning apps is only the beginning. The hard part comes with consistency, intrinsic motivation and trusting the learning process throughout your language journey. Will introducing game elements in the apps help with that? Let’s find out!
In this post, I’ll take you through game based learning, its interactive elements, and gamification research to discover how it turns into effective learning for learning a new language.
Table Of Contents
Gamification In Language Apps: An Overview
Gamification in language learning can create a personalized learning experience for language learners trying to learn a foreign language. How? Game based learning offers interactive lessons that are inviting to students on a learning journey. With education games that put an enjoyable spin on learning, users find appeal in completing lessons. Simply put, the interactive exercises keep you coming back!
What Is Game Based Language Teaching?
Game based learning is all about leveraging the learning process by introducing gamification elements via physical and digital games. Game based language learning has great flexibility and can be done through mobile apps and person-to-person. The ultimate consensus is that games are a fun way to provide learners with interactive activities with educational content that make learning a foreign language engaging and exciting!
What Is An Example Of Gamification In Language Learning?
Game elements could be anything that encourages learner engagement from shuffling flashcards with a buddy to poking around a language learning app on your mobile phone. Gamified learning has made waves with students trying to learn a new language and teachers trying to implement new strategies to improve language acquisition inside their classrooms alike.
The fact that gamification has found its way inside language learning is a huge move for students! Language proficiency bases itself on a word we’ve all heard before: consistency. And with consistency comes another word: practice, practice, practice – which is so important that I have to repeat it three times! Gamification in language apps gives foreign language learners the fun way to tackle the huge decision that is learning a new language.
Connecting Games And Language Learning
In general, the research says that “learning with game playing” significantly enhances learning motivation for students. In a study conducted by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan, the findings said that games tend to demonstrate superior effectiveness in retaining long-term language skill gains.
By connecting what the research says with mobile app learning, we can conclude that gamification in language apps has numerous benefits for foreign language learning students. One key word rules above all – motivation! The target language that a student wants to learn lies beyond a door that is greatly opened by the learner’s own motivation to commit to language proficiency. This is where game elements come in.
“The reason why game-based learning is successful is that it uses the natural desire to play and be competitive, which is inherent in human beings,” says Navdeep Mehta, an expert & Data-Driven Marketer at Diginerve, an EdTech initiative. Navdeep further states, “This approach can help students stay more engaged and motivated, reducing attrition.”
With gaming techniques all at your fingertips, students have access to the tools they need to unite learning and playing for improving their language skills. Mobile apps, like Ling and Duolingo, are excellent examples that dedicate themselves to making language learning easy with proper progress tracking tools, virtual rewards that keep them coming back for more, healthy competition with leaderboards, and instant feedback. All of this makes magic and motivates people who are trying to learn a new language!
Can You Learn A Language With Games?
Will gamification in language apps help you become fluent in a language? It’s hard to say officially, but language learning apps with games in mind can definitely help you get there. The current literature suggests that game based learning does boast impressive benefits for foreign language learners, especially when it comes to vocabulary acquisition.
In a research study conducted by Texas A&M University that investigated digital game based language learning for vocabulary development, the results produced great positives for gamified learning. The findings concluded that the gamified learning gave way to creating engaging vocabulary learning experiences.
The positives from gamification in language apps is clear – optimal visual aspects and increasing learner agency where students have the ability to take their language lessons into their own hands, gamification elements offer a window into enticing engagement and joyful language learning. For students trying to tackle foreign language learning, gamification will be your best friend.
By embracing the fun that language apps can give, people can improve their language skills by interacting with the target language every day (which is proven to help a learner retain language knowledge!) Downloading a language learning app is an awesome first step to take towards language proficiency.
What Games Help You Learn A Language?
When it comes to gamification in language apps and learning, there is a right way to implement game elements that will amplify education yet still make it enjoyable. How? It’s important that games offer objectives and goals for memorization, repetition, and application. Let’s look at the games that will do just that.
Vocabulary Flashcards – The common and easy-to-understand flashcard principle is as easy as read the topic then turn it around and check your answer. This is a general introduction for students learning languages as vocabulary words are introduced little by little, via theme groupings like greetings or days of the week.
Matching – This interactive activity puts a student’s language skills to the test in a low-stakes game where terms and images are mixed up and aimed to be reunited with – you guessed it – a matching game!
Sentence Construction – With gamification in language apps, sentence construction is perhaps one of the best that utilizes knowledge with application. Students aim to piece together sentences with their newly acquired vocabulary or phrases. Bonus? By focusing on certain sentence functions at a time (like pronouns or action verbs) learners can better understand sentence structure and improve their language skills.
Online Community – By having an expansive network of like-minded language learners around you, there’s a supportive web of people there that helps to encourage participation and gifts valuable connections with native speakers through online forums, message boards and conversation groups.
Ling App And Gamification
Language learners will be happy to know that they can take their language knowledge to new heights just by playing games every day. Sound too good to be true? With the Ling app, language learning gamification helps students hone in on a single target language or take on a new one at the same time. Though, it’s advised that you keep your attention on one at a time for maximum learning potential!
Vocabulary Lessons
Gamification in language apps have got to have vocabulary lessons, of course! As a language learner myself, I find it important that vocabulary be introduced in small batches. Personally, I prefer to learn new vocabulary terms in groups that center around certain themes. In my experience learning Japanese through the Ling app, I appreciate the way the vocabulary lessons offer exactly that!
By joining similar words or phrases, it makes it easy to keep your focus on one category at a time. When I was shopping in an Asian market, the Ling app came in as a trusty hero! As I scoured the frozen aisles looking for an ice cream I forgot the name of, the Ling app came to the rescue. I fired it up, looked through my (already in-progress) Japanese lessons course and scrolled down to the Vegetables & Fruits category and bam! I was able to ask a worker about it by saying the words “peach” and “ice cream” in Japanese, and was able to leave the store happy with my peach-flavored ice cream bar in hand.
The Ling app is awesome at organization in this way. For example, the Numbers and Counting category will dive into how to say numbers and weight terminology. In the Basic Sentences category, learners will discover how to say things like “to sleep” or “to shop” and how to use them in a sentence. And in Activities, learners will find out how to say their favorite sport is basketball or ask someone if they want to catch a baseball game.
Sentence Practice
The Ling app’s knack for crafting fill-in-the-blank sentences that will help a user understand where things go properly is a highlight for improving language skills. As one of the Ling users Aqua350 left a puts it in a review, this practice “in particular [offers] authentic conversations contained in each lesson that you can hear and replay [where you can] select which words you hear really helps me with learning a language.” You heard it here first! The audio files on the Ling app are top notch where students can benefit from listening to native speakers for improvements in pronunciation.
The user goes on to say that they choose the Ling app as their “favorite language learning app by far and totally worth the money.” With more than 60 languages available for you to explore, the Ling app definitely has plenty of learning features on top of that to sink your teeth into that give learners like you a fantastic bang for your buck!
Daily Reminders
As humans, we can forget to do things. It’s normal! As much as we want to remain committed with our language learning journeys, we can be busy people with busy lives. The Ling app makes sure to kindly remind you to keep going with handy push notifications so you never have to break a learning streak again. As Ling user Aqua350 puts it, “I like the reminders to learn,” which gives learners a gentle nudge to get their language learning on!
Progress Tracking
The Ling app develops a personalized learning experience with you in mind that adapts to your language journey. You can keep track of it all with its handy progress tracking feature! Ling makes it easy to figure that out with an excellent progress tracking feature that clearly tells you which areas you’re excelling at and which you could use more practice in.
Your achievements are on full display with cool badges that you can show off when you complete tasks like nabbing a 14-day streak, completing a unit with 3 crowns in each lesson, and earning a huge amount of banana points – Ling’s own virtual currency!
Gamification In Language Learning: A Round-Up
Now that we’ve discussed language learning and its benefits through gamification, are you convinced of what it can do for you? Gamification in language learning is a vital part of the process that will help students of language get on the road to fluency.
Learning new languages is a challenge, but it can be fun! When you finally get to flex your language skills using new words in real life with people, you’ll realize just how worth it is to get started with foreign language learning.
Try Gamified Language Learning With Ling
Why wait? Explore gamification in language apps by checking out a leading competitor out there – the Ling app! Why not experience learning Asian and Eastern European languages with Ling?
You can get started for free browsing through an awesome library of languages that span the super popular to the rare Eastern Europe languages that stray away from the mainstream. You can bet Ling is a great place to begin exploring gamification in language learning, and it can work wonders for you. Check it out on the App Store and Google Play Store today!
