Résumé:
Instructing English at the middle school level presents notable struggle, especially for novice
pupils. As a matter of fact, English as foreign language (EFL) instructors always try to
motivate their pupils depending on many approaches like gamification, trying to transform
traditional classrooms, where often pupils have lack of motivation, into more engaging and
interactive ones. The present study has an exploratory nature that relies on qualitative
approach. The classroom observation was implemented as the only data-gathering tool in
order to get deep insights if gamification enhances first year middle school pupils ' motivation
during tutorial sessions and how do they interact during the gamified pedagogical tasks. It was
applied during 20 sessions in two different middle schools in Tebessa. The first one was
Boudiaf Mohammed middle school, and the second was Badri Abd el Hafid middle school,
with 227 pupils who were selected based on purposive sampling technique. The findings
revealed that gamification increases first-year middle school pupils’ extrinsic and intrinsic
motivation, it also helps them to become more interactive and engaged during the English
classes. Eventually, a set of recommendations are proposed for possible future research like
conducting the same study with a larger population so that the results can be generalized.
