The role of gamification in language learning in higher education

In the recent years, gamification has become an increasingly popular way to improve student engagement and motivation in the classroom. Nevertheless, when it comes to language learning, gamification is still only being introduced both to the teachers and students, which is why there is a lack of research on the benefits gamification brings to the adoption of English as a foreign language. Therefore, through a systematic overview of the existing academic literature, this paper aims to research the benefits offered by the gamified learning approach in the world of language learning. The literature searches were conducted in the Scopus database, which was chosen due to the fact that it indexes all other potentially relevant databases, such as ACM, IEEE, Springer, DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, and the AIS Electronic Library. Using only one comprehensive database instead of conducting searches in various repositories was preferred in order to increase the rigor and clarity of data gathering. Since the research field is a still a new one, it was deemed necessary to analyze the ways in which researchers approach the subject. Hence, emphasis was put on the empirical papers and the underpinning theoretical frameworks, methodologies, implemented tools and educational levels analyzed in them. Finally, the paper comes to the conclusion that gamification brings invaluable advantages to language learning courses in higher education, but there is a strong need to dwell deeper into the world of gamification and language acquisition in higher education. The existing research serves as a guideline for carrying out a new, case- study-based approach on students enrolled in a language course at an university level