Motivation fostering through gaming technologies

Abstract

Modern educational strategies are focused on the formation of new students’ life attitudes and personal characteristics: today it is important to develop cognitive skills and promote educational motivation. The ways of fostering motivation of students at the initial stage are discussed in the paper. In this article, special attention is paid to the theoretical issues of teaching English, moreover, methodological foundations of teaching English with the help of gaming technology are reviewed. The analysis of psychological, pedagogical, methodological literature made it possible to reveal the theoretical basis of the problem and create a specific approach for stimulating students’ motivation. The article presents a set of developed didactic games that enhance motivation in the process of teaching the English language at the primary stage. The authors have studied in detail the problem of using game and play activity at English lessons, have identified its positive effect on learning, training and revising of educational material. A number of didactic requirements for games are examined, thus identified the necessity to take into account the age of learners, their interests, as well as the correct approach to involve each student in the game. The most relevant game technologies are considered separately, and their effectiveness (or inefficiency) is confirmed by means of an experiment. The authors prove the obtained results with reference to statistic sign test as it is considered to be one of the most effective and promising in scientific-analytical and reflexive research. Authors’ theoretical and experimental research has shown the possibility of forming motivation of junior students by means of using didactic games and substantiated the importance of their use to achieve the goal.