Effects of Gamification on Chinese EFL College Students’ Writing Error Awareness and Writing Performance

Abstract

English writing is an important course to improve students’ comprehensive use of language. However, in the current practice of English writing teaching, college students in China still have a variety of problems in writing English compositions. Therefore, how to further improve students’ English writing ability has always been the focus and difficulty of English writing teaching. Although the traditional Error Analysis Theory has systematically studied the common mistakes in college English writing, students’ awareness of common mistakes in English writing still needs to be further improved. The thesis attempts to explore the effectiveness of gamification learning in improving students’ error awareness and writing performance, as well as students’ perception of gamification methods and traditional teaching methods. The experimental results showed that: 1) Gamification learning can help improve students’ awareness of common mistakes in English writing. 2) Gamification learning has obviously raised students’ comprehensive writing results, of which the misformation errors have been improved most significantly, followed by the improvement of cohesion/coherence, content/organization and language. 3) Gamification has been accepted and praised by most students because the instructional content in gamification is more professional, targeted and meaningful, and game design is more interesting and challenging. This study attempts a new exploration to apply gamification into English writing teaching, and has obtained satisfactory results, which has provided not only pedagogical suggestions for English writing teaching, but also some enlightenment for the future studies of gamification in English writing teaching.