ESCAPE ROOM AS A MOTIVATING TOOL IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASSROOM AT TERTIARY EDUCATION

Abstract

The escape room, also known as escape game, is a gamification tool that aims to promote increased motivation and improved teamwork (Wood & Reiners, 2012). Recently, escape rooms have achieved prominence in the classroom as pedagogical instruments valid for any type of discipline. In the educational field in particular, the escape room can be defined as an action game in real time where the players, in teams, solve a series of puzzles or problems and carry out tasks related to the curricular contents worked on throughout the course, in one or more rooms with a specific objective and at a specific time (Nicholson, 2015). To do this, learners must put into practice the knowledge acquired about a particular subject, as well as their creative and intellectual abilities, and deductive reasoning. Despite being a pedagogical tool that has emerged as an innovative element in the last five years or so, the use of escape rooms for teaching-learning the English language at different educational levels has been studied qualitatively and quantitatively (Dorado Escribano, 2019; López Secanell & Ortega Torres, 2020). However, there is no study on the applicability of the escape room in the English literature classroom at the tertiary educational level. This paper aims to demonstrate how the inclusion of this innovative pedagogical tool can serve not only for teaching the language, but also for working on theoretical-practical contents of subjects focused on literary studies of the Degree in English Studies. In order to achieve the proposed objectives, the study will focus on the identification of types of exercises to implement as part of the educational escape room aimed at a sample of students; the preparation of tests/ exercises based on the established objectives; the design of a pre- and a post- questionnaire based on the established objectives; the implementation of the escape room in the literature class and the evaluation of the impact of this educational tool to foster students’ motivation.