Abstract:

Introduction:
Over the past decade, gamification has played a critical role in a wide range of areas, including English learning, and even though gamification has demonstrated promising results in this regard, little is known about gamified English teaching. Furthermore, most studies that have focused on the effect of gamification on English teaching have used measurement tools with problematic validity.

Objectives:
This pre-registered study presents a new conceptualisation and development of a measure assessing three dimensions of gamification effectiveness from English teachers’ perspectives: motivation, language learning outcomes and applicability.

Methodology:
A five-member committee was involved in the development process, of which one proficient English speaker first created an item pool from existing measures. Afterwards, three committee members selected the 51 most suitable scale items from the translated pool. Subsequently, 13 additional scale items were formulated by the committee to make up the first version of the scale. This was followed by semi-structured interviews with eight English language teachers at different levels of education, according to which we removed or reformulated items whose meaning was not clear. Afterwards, we selected several scales for the ensuing data collection to test the convergent and discriminant validity assessing teacher-perceived pupils’ motivation, pupils’ and language anxiety, teachers’ mobile learning acceptance and teachers’ digital competence alongside other fundamental data concerning age, teaching practice, GPA etc. The scales were first translated to Czech by a member of the committee and then back-translated to English by an English native speaker, followed by semi-structured interviews with four English teachers to ensure that the original meaning of the adopted items was retained.

Results:
The pre-validation version of the scale consisted of 3 dimensions, containing 18 items for the dimension of motivation, 20 items for the dimension of language learning outcomes, and 26 items for the dimension of applicability. Following the semi-structured interviews, 1 item from the dimension of motivation and 4 items from the dimension of language learning outcomes were removed. The translation of the other scales showed no substantial deviation from the intended meaning if the original scale was adopted to Czech. The data collection is currently in progress.

Conclusion:
The initial pilot development and the subsequent pre-validation data collection process underwent rigorous procedures following standardised guidelines and suggestions of published studies.

Keywords:

Gamification, English teaching, scale, teachers' perspectives, technology enhanced teaching.