Using English to escape the pandemic: An educational escape room proposal

Abstract

In the last few years, the development of technologies has brought new methodologies to the field of education. One of them is gamification, the use of game elements in contexts different from games (Deterding, Khaled, Nacked & Dixon, 2010), in this case in educational settings. Educational escape rooms are one of the games that can be implemented in classrooms. As in standard escape rooms, the goal is to complete all the activities and ‘escape’ from a locked room (Vörös and Sárközi, 2017). However, in the educational ones, the tasks deal with the contents taught (López-Pernas, Gordillo, Barra & Quemada, 2019). Moreover, it improves several students’ skills, such as critical thinking, motivation, teamwork and problemsolving. Educational escape rooms have been implemented in several fields of study. However, little or none research regarding the implementation of this methodology in English classes has been done. Thus, this paper aims to present a proposal for the implementation of an educational escape room in a last year of secondary school class. The contents of the seventh unit of their book have been used to create the activities that the students have to solve to obtain the code needed to finish the educational escape room. Furthermore, Bloom’s taxonomy will be used to categorise each of the activities proposed. Finally, the structure and design of it are explained in the discussion following the literature reviewed previously.