**1. Introduction**

Does it ever feel that learners are stultified, bored, and unmotivated? Maybe it is not the subject but the way is taught. Competing for the divided attention of learners has never been perplexing. It has become a chronic situation familiar to all teachers struggling to motivate learners. Currently exist a generation of children who have never known a world without video games, mobiles, and the Internet. Demographics of the workforce mean that those retiring are being replaced by people who grew up with these things (aged 18–40). We now routinely divide our attention between many things simultaneously.

Traditional educational methods no longer work because they are designed to make learners fundamentally passive. They focus on instructing learners in specific and limited processes before testing what learners can remember from what they have been told. Often, tests do not consider the variable factors that can affect the trial's outcome: learning styles, ages, and abilities, learners' performance on a particular day, whether they have had enough sleep the night before, or whether they have eaten before taking the test. Moreover, when teachers are on their feet and teaching for 6 or 7 hours, all day, every day, it is all too easy for them to reteach literally by the book to achieve school goals.

Sticking rigidly to the textbook, delivering teacher-centred lessons without considering students' learning styles and experiences, and assessing students based on what they can remember all result in inferior education. Students do not need textbooks. No number of books and no amount of class time will do any good. There is no engagement. Essentially, there is no learning.

Learners need hands-on, interactive experiences that stimulate their understanding and aptitudes to help them deal with real-world concerns. As a manner of fact, learners should be actively involved in the education process. It is where play-based wisdom comes in. Gamification, game-based learning, or game-based learning refers to a game with clear and defined learning outcomes. It means using well-designed digital and non-digital games to stimulate learners' language, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. Include game elements in the learning environment to drive engagement and participation. A group of people sits while the teacher gives them a game. Not all games are the same. Teachers need to reconsider the structure of the play experience: are the learning outcomes clear, and could it leave learners frustrated or bored? Ultimately, all learning environments should encourage active and critical learning, not passive. Game-based instruction furnishes this flawless background. The best matches are those that actively immerse learners in experiencing the pleasure of exploring and apprehending a new system.

Well-designed games, played in diverse ways, using mixed media and platforms, can mainly cut through distractions and engross learners in a way few other ways can. Games can include word, language, narrative, and role-playing games and digital platforms. Multimedia can be used at almost all ages and language levels, from acquiring literacy skills and practising listening and speaking to improving critical thinking and problem-solving skills and developing digital literacy skills (collectively known as twenty-first-century skills). The beauty of gamification as a multimedia methodology strategy in the learning environment is that learners quickly develop autonomy and can easily self-correct with minimal emotional stress. There is a clear progression path, and learners can learn at their own pace.

### **2. The evolution of the methods used in English language teaching**

## **2.1 Early beginnings (The Latin and Greek Heritage until the nineteenth/ twentieth century)**

Latin was the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in medieval and early modern Europe. Thus, relevant people studied Classical Latin in grammar schools, where teachers focused on the analysis of its grammar and rhetoric in grammar schools. The emphasis is put on the study of declensions and conjugations, translation, and the composition of sample sentences [1].

*Gamification as a Multimedia Methodology Strategy in the English Language Teaching… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109716*

While Latin was the most dominant language in the Middle Ages in the Western world, in the sixteenth century, we appreciate a change. Such languages gradually replaced Latin as Italian, French, and English. Little by little, Latin fell into disuse as a language of spoken and written communication, and it survived mainly as a subject in the school curriculum [1].

#### **2.2 The grammar-translation method (1840–1940s)**

The literature study is essential to support mental discipline and intellectual development in this method. Teachers used to focus on reading and writing, and students elaborated bilingual wordlists to learn vocabulary quickly. The basic unit of teaching was the sentence and the emphasis on accuracy. Grammar was taught deductively instead of inductively. In class, the student's native language was the medium of instruction [2].

#### **2.3 The reform era (mid-nineteenth century)**

Scholars started to consider that child language should be the model for language teaching. Thus, they centred on the contextual use of language and language acquisition was developed through a sequence of related actions, for example, "I walk toward the door—I walk". Consequently, they focused on spoken language and phonetic awareness with an inductive approach to grammar teaching. For them, it was relevant to establish associations within the target language rather than between native and target languages. Because of this, it was common to present new words in meaningful contexts. The main leading developers of this method were C. Marcel (1793–1896), T. Prendergast (1806–1886), and F. Guin (1831–1896, [3]).

#### **2.4 The direct method (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)**

It was also known as the natural method, as observing naturalistic principles became essential. It led to a monolingual teaching approach, emphasising everyday spoken language and supporting direct and spontaneous use of the second language. The grammar was taught inductively, focusing on correct pronunciation and grammar. Teaching was done through demonstration, mimicking, and using pictures, with a gradual progression in difficulty. It was popular in private language schools (Berlitz Method) [4].

#### **2.5 Audiolingual method (middle of the twentieth century)**

This method responded to the structural view of linguistics and behaviourism as a learning theory. Language is considered a system of structurally related elements for coding meaning. Their goal was the mastery of all the aspects of the language system (phonological units: e.g., phonemes; grammatical units: e.g., clauses, phrases, sentences; grammatical operations: e.g., adding, shifting, joining, or transforming elements; and lexical items: e.g., function and structure words). The usage of new media (e.g., tapes) was introduced for continuous practice of listening, speaking, reading, and writing (pattern drill). The focus was on spoken language [5].

### **2.6 Audio-visual method (the 1960s)**

This method was not used sparingly, as it required watching films in monolingual classes. The lessons were strictly divided into phases, focusing on dialogues and classroom discourses [6].

#### **2.7 Main methods nowadays**

Nowadays, new needs have conveyed a change in language teaching methodology. One of the most relevant aspects of society today is group work, and this trend has also reached education. In this section, we will present the two main methods of group work: cooperative and collaborative learning.

#### **2.8 Cooperative learning**

It is an educational approach which aims at turning classroom activities into an academic and social learning experience and has been described as "structuring positive interdependence".

Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively. Unlike individual learning, students' cooperative learning can capitalise on one another's resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, and monitoring one another's work). On the other hand, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Cooperative learning has also been linked to increased levels of student satisfaction, as everyone succeeds when the group grows [7].

After the first approach in 1994, Johnson and Johnson [8] posited five variables that mediate the effectiveness of cooperation and become essential elements of cooperative learning:

Positive interdependence: students must fully participate and put forth effort within their group. Each group member has a task/role/responsibility; therefore, they must believe that they are responsible for their learning and that of their group [9].

Face-to-face promotive interaction: members promote each other's success. Students explain what they have learnt or are learning and assist one another with understanding and completing assignments.

Individual and group accountability: Each student must demonstrate mastery of the content being studied. Each student is accountable for their learning and work, eliminating "social loafing".

Social skills:


*Gamification as a Multimedia Methodology Strategy in the English Language Teaching… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109716*


Group processing:


Cooperative learning is developed using tasks that must be intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher-order thinking tasks. Additionally, they must have two features for the students to achieve significant improvement [11]: Social skills.

