O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
Introduction
Although almost every foreign language teacher agrees on the importance of providing 
students with versatile and meaningful language input as well as opportunities for 
producing language output, students often lack language practice in and outside the 
classroom. Amongst some of the most common reasons are that language courses are 
often too large, in terms of participants, and too short in terms of course hours. This 
makes it not only extremely difficult to provide learners with enough language input and 
practice within the classroom, but also to focus on learners’ particular needs. In recent 
years many teachers and institutions have started integrating in their course syllabus 
blended teaching practices
thus providing students with additional learning tools beyond 
the classroom. Highly interactive tools such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), 
wikis, videoconferencing, virtual worlds, and so on, were for many years amongst the 
most popular tools since they enabled students and teachers to access learning materials 
anytime and anywhere. Furthermore interaction between learners and teachers is no 
longer restricted to the classroom but goes beyond it. The increasing availability of 
ubiquitous mobile technologies such as smartphones or tablets which provide 
multimodality tools including audio, video and text-chat hold 
–
in our opinion- further 
potential to support students’ language learning in and beyond 
the classroom. This, 
coupled with the fact that mobile data connection has become more affordable allows for 
distributed and asynchronous learning with fewer restrictions. The purpose of the present 
study is therefore to explore some of the possibilities of integrating smartphones in 
blended teaching practices so as to provide learners with meaningful language input as 
well as opportunities for using the target language as often as possible in real-world 
communication. Although virtual worlds have proven to be an interesting approach 
(Berns et al, 2013; Garrido & Rodríguez, 2013), they usually need a powerful server to 
run them and PCs on which to play them. Therefore we proposed using a simple chat 
server and light app for widely-spread Android devices. In the following we will offer 
some insight into the architecture of a gamificated App we have designed for a group of 
A1 level students of a German Foreign Language course.