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.

This study presents a systematic review of previous research on e-book-based language learning. E-book-based language learning has been increasingly investigated in the field of language education, whereas previous review studies of relevant literature were relatively low in volume and incomprehensive from aspects of research participants and research perspectives. In the present study, we identified 52 relevant journal articles on e-book-based language learning published in the recent decade, coding them from three dimensions: methodology, e-book devices and features, and research issues and findings. The results indicated that: (a) most studies on e-book-based language learning were of a large sample size and one-session investigation; (b) pre-school children and university students were the most frequently investigated sample groups; (c) computers and tablets were the most frequently used devices; (d) multimedia, feedback giving, gamification and personalisation were the four features most frequently applied in enhancing the efficiency of e-book-based language learning; (e) researchers collected and processed data mainly through pre- and post-tests and group comparisons; (f) learning outcomes, learning behaviours and learners’ psychological states were investigated in most studies, whereby the findings indicated overall positive effects of e-book on language learning. Copyright © 2020 Laboratory for Knowledge Management & E-Learning, The University of Hong Kong.