”Read on”: comprehending challenging texts at university through gamification App

Abstract

Despite the common misperception of playing games as wasteful activity, studies found that some of its components may contribute to users’ knowledge generation, soft skill improvement, and foreign language learning. This article reports the development of an application for reading and the initial impacts of the gamification-based application on students’ reading comprehension in English. The application was aimed to support generation Z's university students who are well exposed to gadgets with the ability in comprehending challenging texts. In addition to the sociocultural theory of learning and second language acquisition theories, we considered factors like university students as users, texts’ complexity offered at the university level, and gamification features in designing the application. The study resulted in a prototype of a gaming activity called” ReadOn”. Surveys, interviews, and experiments were carried out on a small group of participants during, and after designing processes. The Survey data was used as a foundation to design the app while the interview and the experiments provided data to explore the usability of the newly built prototype. The data of students’ experience in using the prototype was used as feedback for future development of the platform.