Design of a dual-hierarchy scaffolding board game-based learning activity for EFL reading comprehension

Promoting English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ reading comprehension, improving their reading motivation, and reducing their anxiety have always been the focus of EFL researchers. Educational board games have gradually received attention from educators. Various studies have found that board game-based teaching can improve students’ learning performance, motivation, and classroom engagement, and contribute to increasing discussion. However, there are few discussions on board games in the field of EFL, so further discussion is necessary to fill the research gap of board games in EFL reading comprehension. This study developed a dual-hierarchical scaffolding board game activity framework integrating game-based learning (GBL) and scaffolding strategies, and used card board games as teaching materials to promote EFL students’ reading comprehension. The game activity framework provides a scaffolded language learning environment with dual-hierarchy concepts to support students in building successful reading strategies. Moreover, the verbal and visual representations are displayed together on the cards game component. Game mechanics can help students to link verbal and image information. On the other hand, this framework emphasizes allowing students to first use the group discussion and collaborative reading mode to conduct self-directed and game-based learning activities with the dual-hierarchy scaffolding strategy. Then the teacher guides the students to use the concepts learned in the game activities to analyse and read the text so that they can understand the text content. A quasi-experimental design was conducted in a high school English reading course to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The experimental results showed that the proposed framework not only significantly promoted the EFL students’ reading comprehension and learning motivation and decreased their learning anxiety, but also helped them maintain a high level of learning motivation in the process of the activities. It is expected that the proposed structure can lead to better EFL teaching practices.