Vocabulary Kingdom: gamified EAP vocabulary acquisition using blended learning

Students in higher education should work on acquiring academic vocabulary as this is essential to skilfully communicating with other members of the academic community. Vocabulary acquisition is an essential but frequently neglected process due to the intensity, time pressure, and high stakes of short, assessment-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses designed to prepare students for their postgraduate academic programme. Thus, in this experiment, student motivation to engage with vocabulary acquisition is considered in the context of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which provides a framework for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In particular, intrinsic motivation is engendered by feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness; extrinsic motivation is rooted in quantifiable outcomes. With these theories in mind, Vocabulary Kingdom is a game that was created for an EAP, higher education classroom context, with the rationale of motivating students to spend more time engaged in vocabulary acquisition. This game features blended learning, with activities occurring in the classroom context and online.