Atividades gamificadas em aplicativos móveis: a forma de apresentação e as estratégias de ensino de léxico de inglês

Abstract

This research theme is the use of mobile applications, with resources of gamification, Duolingo, Hello English and Mondly, in English language lexicon teaching. Mobile learning, which happens throughout mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, was described by UNESCO (2014) as an innovation because it allows learning anytime and anywhere. Therefore, academic discussions about this theme have been brought up about the applications effectiveness, concerning to foreign language learning. It has been widely discussed whether they truly represent an innovation or if they are just reproducing traditional approaches in a digital tool. From a wide learning perspective view, many researches have been done about this subject, however, when it comes to lexicon learning, the discussions are still incipient. In this regard, we seek to contribute to fulfill with this gap presented in this area. Thus, this research aims to identify the way lexicon is presented and what are the strategies of lexicon consolidation used in activities presented by Duolingo, Hello English and Mondly applications. Therefore, we used the studies about technologies in education, Lexicon Studies, with authors such as Genouvrier and Peytard (1974), Dubuc (1985), Barbosa (1992; 1997), Biderman (1996; 1998; 2001), Vilela (1999), Leffa (2001) and Abade (2011). Concerning to gamification discussions, we used authors such as Deterdin (2001), Kapp (2013), Alves (2015) and Leffa (2014;2016). This research lies in the Lexicon Studies area, and its approach is qualitative and interpretative. The corpus was generated from smartphone printscreens of the activities presented in main lessons of the three applications analyzed. In general, the results indicate that the lexicon presentation is done by thematic units, such as which are mainly divided by lexical fields, and its strategy for correcting the lexicon occurs through translation and repetition. The elements of gamification appear mainly in order to encourage the continuity of the student/user in his learning process.