Read to Escape

Abstract

       Read to Escape is an educational game that dedicates to help Adult English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners to improve their reading comprehension and vocabularies. As adult EFL learners, many people don’t have enough time to engage in English instruction constantly because they are often caught up with other things in their life: work, study, family, etc. Therefore, many adult EFL learners express the need for English learning opportunities in the informal learning environment (Arkady Zilberman, 2020). What Read to Escape does, is to provide such an opportunity through a “puzzle-solving” and “Choose your own adventure” type of storytelling game so that adult EFL learners can practice reading and memorizing vocabularies through an enjoyable and engaging experience. Imagine someone who just finished all the tasks and family issues and wants to use his or her personal time to read a short fiction before sleep. Read to Escape would be the perfect choice as an interactive reading game that also helps to improve English skills.

Target Audience

       The target audience of this design is adult EFL learners who are no longer receiving mandatory English instructions.

Constraints

       Adult EFL learners face many constraints that make the English learning process particularly hard for them. The main constraints are as followed:

1.      Environment: Unlike English as Second Language learners who live in a dominant English-speaking environment (1st generation immigrants), EFL learners (Someone in China) do not have reliable access to an authentic English learning environment (Akbari, 2015). 

2.      Learning Ability: Research suggests that adult English learners have a drastic decline in language learning ability comparing to children. Unfortunately, the reason behind such a drop is still unclear (Ducharme, 2018).  

• Time Commitment: According to the research of the US Foreign Service Institute, it takes around 480 hours of practice to reach basic fluency in English (BBC, 2019). In order to reach basic fluency, an adult learner needs to commit 1.3 hours every day to accomplish the goal within a year. It’s already a huge time commitment for many people, not speaking if they want to learn English in a short time or better fluency.
• Lack of Choices: Adult EFL learners who are not attending any English courses or can’t afford to keep taking courses until they become proficient in English, have very limited choices to learn English. Most apps on the market focus on repetition and quizzes to teach learners English, which are highly inefficient on adult learners who are experienced declines in language learning ability.

Need & Learning Goal

       Due to the four constraints, adult EFL learners need a new learning experience that’s meaningful, authentic, time-manageable, and equipped with more advanced linguistic learning methods.

Therefore, Read to Escape was created to make such a learning experience comes true. On the other side, because English learning has so many perspectives including reading, listening, writing, and speaking. The learning goal of Reading to Escape will focus on providing a qualified learning experience for adult EFL learners to improve reading comprehension and vocabulary, which are essential to the development of other English skills.

How to play 

  Click on the correct keywords will allow you to collect morphemes(word units including root words, prefix, and suffix) into the words inventory. Darg the morphemes into the correct blanks to complete the story. 

Mechanism

This game has a very simple click and drag mechanism. Users click on the text to collect the morphemes from the text and drag them into the blanks from the word inventory at the bottom. 

This simple mechanism allows the game to be played on devices like cell phones or iPads. Players can the game when they are waiting for subways, before sleep, or other fragmented time slots.

Dynamics

       “Puzzle-solving”: The game is not a simple “fill-in-blanks” quiz, it requires users to collect pieces of word versions of Jigsaws and to place them into the correct locations. This requires users to understand the meaning and properties of incomplete words as well as predicting possible morpheme choices.

       “Choose your own Adventure”: The fact that one morpheme can be combined with other morphemes to create words in completely different meanings allows users to make a “CYOA” type of choice when filling the blank, triggering different endings, or following storylines.