Applying gamification incentives in the Revita language-learning system

We consider the importance of gamification features for a language-learning platform designed for targets intermediate to advanced learners. Our main thesis is: learning toward advanced levels requires a massive investment of time. If the learner engages in more practice sessions, and if the practice sessions are longer, we can expect the learning results to be better. This principle appears to be nearly tautologically self-evident. Yet, keeping the learner engaged in general---and building gamification features in particular---requires substantial efforts on the part of developers. Our goal is to keep the learner engaged in long practice sessions over many months---rather than for the short-term. In academic research on language learning resources are typically scarce, and gamification usually is not considered an essential priority for allocating resources. We argue in favor of giving serious consideration to gamification in the language learning setting---as a means of enabling more in-depth research. In this paper, we introduce different gamification incentives in a learning platform. We discuss the problems in obtaining quantitative measures of the effectiveness of gamification features in the system.