This article reports on the results of a qualitative interpretive pilot study investigating the role of comic strips on tertiary ESP learners’ motivation and discipline-specific language learning. The participants were 10 third-year students enrolled in two discipline-specific English courses at a university in Hong Kong. The results show that integrating multimodality through comic strips helped to transform the traditional delivery of instruction and also motivated and facilitated learners’ understanding of discipline-specific concepts and vocabulary. Participants also indicated that technology contributed to more student agency and fostered language creativity as they expended more effort in their learning. The findings suggest the need for ESP teachers to explore technology and integrate creativity and multimodality in the delivery of discipline-specific course content. Copyright © 2021 Asian ESP Journal.

Undergraduates are often advised to expand their discipline-specific vocabulary in order to cope with the rigor of reading and writing academic texts. For the students studying in English-medium settings, it is in their interest to acquire vocabulary in their disciplines as this is vital to academic success. While students recognize the importance of discipline-specific vocabulary acquisition, they are typically unable to do so due to their heavy work on learning and assessment tasks. With the advent of mobile technology, one way to address this problem is to create vocabulary apps. To meet this need, this paper presents a gamified, discipline-specific vocabulary learning app Books vs Brains@PolyU. It was developed to help busy undergraduates to build a repertoire of the vocabulary across seven disciplines. We explored students' perceptions and evaluation of this tool via interviews with sixteen student participants of the project. The results show that students found the tool useful and motivating, indicating the effectiveness of the app in helping busy undergraduates to build and expand their knowledge of discipline-specific vocabulary. Copyright © 2021 Hong Kong Bao Long Accounting And Secretarial Limited. All rights reserved.