Gamification for the Development of Pluriliteracies in the Era of the Eudaimonic Turn of the Humanities. The SENS Archive in the ESL Classroom: from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

This paper investigates innovative methods for enhancing language education through gamification, grounded in principles such as pluriliteracies, positive learning, and deep learning. Inspired by the PRIN PNRR 2022 SENS (Shakespeare’s Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and Their European Dissemination) project, this study focuses on integrating intertextually connected European Renaissance literary works from the late 1400s to the early 1600s – specifically, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (first printed in 1470), its 1545 French translation by Antoine Le Maçon, and William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c. 1610) – into the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom or, more broadly, into multilingual education. By employing the textual segmentation techniques adopted by the SENS team for the project’s digital archive, this paper outlines examples of activities to engage students in secondary and tertiary learning environments. The tasks focus on developing disciplinary literacies, including foreign languages, philology, historical linguistics, literary criticism, and Digital Humanities, among others, to foster deep learning across languages, cultures, and subjects. Through gamified activities, students are encouraged to critically engage with texts, promoting collaboration (i.e., cooperative learning) and cultural awareness. Ultimately, this research highlights the transformative potential of gamification in language education, equipping learners with the tools to communicate knowledge adeptly across various disciplines and cultural landscapes.