The impact of self-development competitiveness-oriented tasks on Spanish learners’ motivation in foreign language teaching

The drastic shift from predominately face-to-face traditional classes to virtual or hybrid teaching introduced after the COVID-19 pandemic urges us to challenge our teaching practice and the materials to keep or enhance students’ incentives because their motivation is a powerful force for incremental learning. On the other hand, recent educational trends appear to encourage competition avoidance. However, theoretically speaking, meaningfully gamified self-improvement-oriented competitive learning materials have the possibility to be significantly useful materials to activate students’ instinct motivation. Based on this assumption, this study aims to explore the potential of online exercises using Moodle, which incorporates the theories of meaningful gamification and self-improvement competitiveness, to motivate the students, support better performance, and serve as a source of learning enjoyment. Using the data collected in a Spanish university, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken. Our findings reveal that the online exercises helped students to achieve satisfactory performance outcomes. In addition, they apparently contributed to the alternation of motivation from the superficial extinct incentive to the genuine instinct one, which is the key factor for steady and sustainable language learning.