Gamifying Academic English Skills in Higher Education: Reading Academic English App

Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in collaboration with 5 other European institutions, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), Wyższa Szkoła Lingwistyczna in Częstochowa (WSL), Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC), Amistad IT company from Poland and Universite de Pau et des Pays de L'Adour (UPPA), have developed StratApp (StrategiesApp), a mobile application that combines the educational purpose of boosting students' academic reading skills in English with game-design elements and game principles. This app gave birth to a second app called StratApp Swahili: Kiswahili is the vehicular language in the schools of Kenya. Nevertheless, many of the students speak other aboriginal languages at home, and Kiswahili is no their first language. This fact implies that many students have reading comprehension difficulties, and this fact slows down their learning process. The aim of this project is to use the StratApp to enhance their reading comprehension with motivating materials that can be downloaded anywhere from a simple mobile phone device.