Abstract:

Teaching is a complicated and diverse job, and one of the most crucial problems educators have always faced is the problem of motivating students. Traditional methods of education not always work today because some of them are not designed for students to be active and creative. Rigidly sticking to the textbook, delivering teacher-centred lessons with little consideration of learning styles, students’ background and needs cannot be beneficial for the students' performance and for the teacher’s professional growth. New approaches to teaching a foreign language should meet the needs of modern generation of learners who have never known a world without videogames, mobiles and the Internet. It is crucial for teachers to be on the same wavelength with their students, to speak their “digital” language, to turn from a technophobe to a digital native. Using games in education is a subject which keeps developing to the extent that a new term, gamification, was coined; it has become familiar to all teachers when struggling to motivate learners. The work shows a practical example of using computer applications at English language lessons with students of the first year of studying at university.

Keywords:

Games, motivation, computer applications, generation of learners, digital natives, needs, academic performance, new teaching approach, innovative methods, technologies.