Rethinking the promotion of reading through the eZoomBook platform

International audienceDeveloped by researchers at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes School of Engineering, the eZoomBook platform was designed to provide the means to create a learner-friendly experience to reading. In collaboration with Audencia Nantes School of Management, we conducted a number of experiments to test the pedagogical effectiveness of the methodology to be adapted to the platform. The platform allows contributors to collaboratively create and share multi-level books called “eZoomBooks”, where readers can access abridged versions of the original by a zooming function. Our workshops were first designed for “literature buffs” at the university level who were reading in a foreign language. We then decided to test the applicability of the method to a very different profile of students, mainly high school students who had little experience of reading in English. Both experimentations demonstrated that the eZoomBook online platform enabled students to enhance their motivation to read in a foreign language as well as improve their reading comprehension