Developing a gamified system and a questionnaire for the future study of students’ motivation through gamification for learning Spanish as a foreign language in the university context

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a research work that is aimed at developing a gamified system and a questionnaire to analyse, in a subsequent phase, how the motivation of university students of Spanish as a second language changes in a gamification context. The article is part of the data-collection phase for a doctoral thesis. Here, we discuss the following research question: to what extent does gamification influence students’ motivation when learning Spanish as a foreign language? Firstly, there arises a need for developing the specific gamified system that will be implemented among several groups of university students of Spanish as a second language. Secondly, an instrument must be created so that the data obtained from the system implementation could be collected and sorted, with the final purpose to provide the research question an empirical response within the subsequent phases of the study. The objective of this work involves the gathering of other comparable studies to make them the basis for a new own gamified system design and questionnaire which, in turn, would become a model for further similar works, by admitting the necessary modifications according to each specific context. Therefore, this work enumerates the different phases of the process that has been carried out to develop the questionnaire and the gamified system, whose configuration has been adjusted to the specific environment and needs. These tools will enable us to determine, in the successive phase of the empirical study, to which extent the motivation of those university students of Spanish as a second language chosen for the gamification experiment has increased from the time they were immersed in it.