The use of Kahoot in enhancing students’ learning experience, engagement and collaboration in English literature classes

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges that teachers have to deal with is maintaining students’ engagement and attention during lectures. With the emergence of game-based personal response systems like Kahoot!, teachers can gamify their classrooms and increase students’ motivation, engagement and classroom dynamics. Not many studies have examined the impact of using Kahoot in English literature classes; therefore, this article aims to investigate students’ perceptions of how Kahoot influences their learning experience, engagement and collaboration in English literature lessons. The study was conducted in three English literature classes at Quy Nhon university in semester 2 of the academic year 2021-2022. Eighty second-year students who majored in English Language Teaching participated in the study and completed the questionnaires after three sessions of Kahoot. The questionnaires consist of 20 Likert-scale questions which require students to choose the appropriate options ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree and one multiple-choice question asking about students’ preferences of the frequency of Kahoot sessions. In addition, there are two open-ended questions which ask students to give further opinions on what they like and what they don’t like about Kahoot. The findings revealed that students had positive experiences participating in Kahoot sessions and reported that Kahoot helped them to enhance their learning experience, engagement and collaboration in general. These findings suggest that teachers of English literature should incorporate Kahoot games into the lessons to encourage students to participate, communicate and interact with the teacher and their peers.