The Gamification of EAP Robin Turner BUSEL / BALEAP Conference, 2012 Abstract Games have always been a staple of English language teach- ing, but their use has been concentrated at elementary levels; in contrast, English for academic purposes is often thought of as too serious to warrant games in class. At the same time, “gamification” has become a buzzword in education, business and social activism. This paper draws on the practice of gamifi- cation not only to show that games have a place in the EAP class, but more importantly, to demonstrate how we can learn from games to make learning more playful. In particular I show how certain characteristics of online games make them addictive— notably clear long- and short-term goals, constant feedback, en- hanced self-image, “flow”, and the balance of collaboration and competition—and how we can try to introduce these qualities to EAP courses. Despite its current popularity, the word “gamification” was practi- cally unknown before 2010. There is thus some disagreement about what it means, or indeed whether the word is worth using at all, but the general view is that it refers to “applying the mechanics of gaming to nongame activities to change people’s behavior” (Bunch- ball, 2010, p. 2). Educationalists often make a distinction between “gamification” and “game-based learning”, with the latter referring to the use of actual games and the former simply to the use of game features; however, in this paper I shall use “gamification” broadly to include both of these. While hangman, for example, is a game, not a gamified activity, the insertion of word games into a curriculum can still be seen as gamification, because a curriculum is not a game. Whether they use the terms “gamification”, “game-based learning” or “serious games”, there is considerable interest among educators in applying the power of games to learning in the hope “that we can harness the spirit of play to enable players to build new cogni- tive structures and ideas of substance” (Klopfer, Osterweil & Salen, 2009). Games have always been a staple of English language teaching (ELT), but they are far less common in Englsih for academic pur- poses (EAP). In an online survey I conducted of 32 colleagues at 1