Abstract:

The increasingly prominent presence of smartphones in our social practices has favored a growing availability of applications (apps) of all sorts and led the developers of these apps to invest in a large niche of market: that of learning additional languages in general, and that of learning Portuguese as an additional language, more specifically. The scientific literature has discussed the potential of using such devices as well as digital games in learning additional languages. The latter, sometimes referred to as 'gamified activities' by developers in online stores, has attracted the attention of scholars for their ability to favor learning in which the play element helps promote a high level of motivation and spontaneous affiliation to communities of learners. This conceptual confusion between games and 'gamified activities' points to the need for studies that evaluate what these apps have of games, or to what extent their activities can be said to be 'gamified'. In this paper, we present a study that aimed to assess whether digital apps for the learning of Portuguese as an additional language incorporate principles of ‘gamification’. Using the method of focused description, the study identifies a set of 'gamification' principles that serve as a tool to assess whether the apps selected for the research present such principles and discuss the classification of these apps as games or 'gamified' activities. We try to establish theoretically informed parameters to classify these apps as games or 'gamified activities', and test their effectiveness by evaluating free, popular and well-rated/reviewed apps for learning Brazilian Portuguese available in mobile virtual stores. The results suggest a dispersed presence of 'gamification' elements in the apps analyzed, with an average of integration of principles ranging from 32.5% to 55%. Although it does not seem possible to classify the apps analyzed in this study as games, we may consider them 'gamified activities' since there is no prescription in the literature of a minimum integration. The parameters devised for the evaluation seem to provide a satisfactory tool for analyzing the 'gamification' in mobile apps.

Keywords:

Gamification, Digital Applications, Mobile Devices, Portuguese as an Additional Language.