“Learning from real life and not books”: A gamified approach to Business English task design in transatlantic telecollaboration

2017

This paper deals with task design in the context of a telecollaboration project which was carried out in a Business English course among students from Spain and the United States. The goal was to provide students with opportunities to develop linguistic, intercultural and digital competences by interacting and collaborating online with native speakers of the target language. A task-based approach was adopted and enriched by gamification, the different tasks being designed with a view towards engaging students intrinsically in the learning process. This was achieved by means of the adoption of gamification strategies and techniques such as the use of points, performance graphs, quests, avata…