The effectiveness of self-study English reading apps (Mint Reading) on Chinese university students’ English reading abilities

This paper reported on how Chinese university students use the Mint Reading App to improve their English reading abilities. Eight university students were invited to participate in a case study, which recorded their detailed learning processes and tested their improvement in reading ability. The results demonstrated that the students had clear improvement on their reading speed and overall comprehensive abilities. Some also improved their vocabulary and syntactic analysis abilities. The improvement of these abilities was proportional to the effort they put on learning in this app. Fifty students who had completed the “100-day reading” were invited to do a questionnaire on how this app benefited their reading ability. The results showed the advantages of this app and several improvements of users’ reading ability. Based on the results, suggestions for English reading lessons in Chinese universities were discussed.