4.2 Discussion
4.2.1 Attitude towards reading in English
The participants’ attitude towards reading in English before and after the experiment is discussed from three angles: what attitude had been changed, how it had been changed and why it had been changed.
What attitude had been changed. The answer to the first research question, “Can
e-books affect EFL high school students’ reading attitude?” is affirmative, which canbe supported by the results of the pre- and post-reading attitude scale, the self-report form, the field notes as well as the reaction questionnaire. The first instrument provided quantitative data to answer the first research question while the other three provided qualitative data. As the results of the pretest and the posttest on the participants’ attitude towards reading in English showed, their attitude before and after the experiment was significantly different and the change was rather obvious and positive. When Stokmans’s viewpoint (1999) towards reading attitude is adopted, it is encouraging that all of the scores of the four dimensions, Utility, Development, Enjoyment and Escape, increased at a significant level. When the other concept of reading attitude (Yamashita, 2004) is used to examine the participants’ attitudinal change, it can also be detected that they had a positive change in terms of all the three components, cognitive, affective and conative aspects, judged from those qualitative data as well as reflective feedback collected through the other three instruments.
Cognitively, they believed that English e-books were beneficial for them and they had the desire and ambition to keep reading. Affectively, they regained their confidence as well as interest in English and they began to love reading in English as a pastime because of these English e-books. Conatively, they took actions by spending their free time reading these English e-books and started to develop a reading habit to do outside reading in English at home by themselves regularly with an increasing amount of reading, just as Anderson-Inman and Horney (1999), Desrosiers (1996) and McFall (2005) intuitively suggested that e-books are particularly good for outside reading. In one word, the participants’ reading attitude was reinforced in both four dimensions and three components because of the English e-books.
How attitude had been changed. In order to look into how the participants’
reading attitude had been changed, the issue is explored from three aspects. First, their attitudinal change throughout the ten weeks is discussed regarding the three
components and four dimensions of reading attitude. Then, the role which proficiency in English played in their attitudinal change is analyzed. Finally, the correlation between the affective responses in the self-report form and the scores of the posttest is examined through the cases of the participants with distinct reading attitude.
Based upon the self-report form, the teacher-researcher could be able to discern the participants’ subtle attitudinal changes during the ten-week e-book ERP. They demonstrated their reading attitude in many columns of the self-report form; for example, they had to rank the e-book they read and write down what they thought of reading in English after reading it. In order to further analyze their changes on the regard of reading attitude, its three components and four dimensions should be adopted again. Cognitively, not many of the participants initially believed that English books were a must for them to be successful in society or to improve their self-knowledge; that is, they did not highly value English books in terms of the dimensions of Utility and Development. However, after the fifth week of the experiment, they found that they could learn not only English but also knowledge, common sense and moral, which gradually convinced them of the usefulness and helpfulness of English books. At the end of the e-book ERP, they gave reflective feedback on the reaction questionnaire, stating that they benefited from English e-books a great deal, which encouraged them to strongly believe that English e-books had worked well on them in many aspects, and so would it be on their younger schoolmates. Affectively, novelty of e-books, in the beginning, did arouse their curiosity in e-books and enhance their interest in reading in English, but as time went by, passion for e-books gradually faded away, which was later on replaced by the sense of achievement whenever they learned something, comprehended the text, finished an e-book or achieved the weekly goal of reading four e-books. Finally, they could really appreciate the fun of English reading and enjoyed reading English
e-books as their pastime at home. They were willing to squeeze out some time from their busy schedule to read English e-books for fun and for learning simultaneously, which can be regarded as manifestation of the dimension, Enjoyment. Conatively, only ten of them (9.17%) read extensively, achieving the target of finishing 40 e-books within ten weeks, though 44.95% of them did have the experience of reading English e-books at home voluntarily. It was a pity that some of them tried to read at home on their own only during the first two weeks, and later on they chose to read at school. However, in the reaction questionnaire, they mentioned that reading e-books could help them escape from the reality and forget unpleasant things in life, which was identical to the dimension of Escape. They also strongly expressed their hope that this e-book ERP could be extended longer, and then it might be possible that most of them would develop habits of reading in English at the end, as Adam and Wild (1997), Alexander (1991) and Hafiz and Tudor (1989) believe that outside reading helps the development of automatic reading habits.
When the factor of proficiency in English is taken into consideration, there is a tendency that lower-proficient participants’ attitudinal change was much bigger than higher-proficient participants’. In the posttest of the reading attitude scale, the means gained among lower-proficient participants were almost twice as large as those among higher-proficient participants, 12.42 to 6.66, and difference in mean scores between these two groups had been shortened from 9.39 on the pretest to 3.63 on the posttest.
Take the participant Yuki for example, her scores on the pretest was 38 but she scored 72 on the posttest (SUM=96), which was not uncommon among the other lower-proficient participants. The main reason may be that the participants of relatively higher proficiency had already had relatively high interest in English before the experiment, so their attitudinal change might not be as big as those of relatively lower proficiency after the intervention. Similar results also showed in Adam and
Wild’s experiment (1997), in which the treatment group, reading CD-ROM storybooks, did not outperform the control group, reading printed books, in terms of their reading attitude at the end of the treatment period, but reluctant readers in the treatment group did prefer CD-ROM storybooks to printed ones while willing readers liked both. Matthew (1996) also believed that e-books could motivate even the most reluctant readers. Another reason for this phenomenon, inferred from the responses in the self-report form, was that most of the higher-proficient participants seemed to have their own judgment and firm attitude towards things, which could not be easily changed within a short time. They might be open to new things, but that did not necessarily mean they would accept new things quickly or discard their old beliefs unless the intervention was long enough for them to reshape their thinking or attitude.
What is more, based on the firsthand observation in the computer classroom, lower-proficient participants tended to be easily attracted by and depend on multimedia elements or features of e-books while higher-proficient participants emphasized more on content of e-books and found e-books with pictures only acceptable; therefore, the former seemed to favor e-books more than the latter did and their attitudinal change in reading in English was greater as well.
When the focus is shifted to the participants with distinct reading attitude, the teacher-researcher wondered whether their attitude shown in the self-report form could predict their attitudinal change tested in the post reading attitude scale.
Surprisingly, there was no significant correlation between them. Those who had distinct positive attitude or ranked e-books high did not all gain more means on the posttest of reading attitude than the others, and those with neutral or negative attitude did not all scored low on the posttest. The inference was that their reflective responses in the self-report form were specific to a certain e-book, which could not represent a general feeling towards all e-books. They might dislike certain e-books because of the
way they were presented, rank them low and write down some negative reflections, but, generally speaking, they still believed that English e-books were beneficial and interesting to them. Therefore, their attitude towards reading in English was high on the posttest, showing that they would not feel disappointed with all of the e-books only because of some e-books which they disfavored, and this resulted in no correlation between the participants’ attitudinal change and their responses of what they thought of reading in English in the self-report form.
Why attitude had been changed. From the qualitative data collected through the
self-report form, the field notes and the reaction questionnaire, it may be justified to conclude that the participants’ attitude towards reading in English was enormously reinforced mainly because of the unique nature of e-books. First of all, e-books should be read on computers, and using computers already implied excitement and novelty to almost all of the participants. This anticipation and impression made them willing to get involved in the e-book ERP before it really began and when it was being conducted. This phenomenon was in line with what Janssens (1977) claimed, a change from routine lectures in the classroom was welcome to students and could therefore arouse their interest in learning. After this reading activity ended, the participants strongly wished they could read the English e-books in the computer classroom again some day. Second, e-books consist of different features, which were not only interesting but also helpful to the participants. Through reading these English e-books, they could not only learn something, including English, moral, knowledge and common sense, but also feel something. Certain settings or characters with particular atmosphere or tone would evoke their various emotional responses or trigger their reflective moods; fortunately, most of them were positive ones. They easily learned from reading enjoyably, so it is predictable that they would have a positive attitudinal change. Third, e-books are relatively short, compared withauthentic English novels or graded readers, so, averagely, they could finish one e-book within seven minutes. For most of them, this was a great achievement and encouragement, especially for those participants with lower proficiency, who had never imagined that they would be able to finish one English book within such a short time.
The top ten principles for implementing ERPs proposed by Williams (1986), Day and Bamford (2002, 2004) also contributed a lot to the success of this e-book ERP. It can be discussed from four aspects: materials, the reading activity itself, readers and the teacher. First, the teacher-researcher selected a variety of interesting and easy materials on a wide range of topics and genres and then categorized them into five groups based on their genres with levels and features clearly listed out. With this list, the participants could easily and quickly find the e-book they were interested in and linked to the web page. As for the reading activity itself, it was purposeful, task-based and interactive and its purpose was related to pleasure, information, and general understanding, as Williams and Bamford and Day respectively suggested. The primary activity was the participants’ reading texts individually without other additional exercises or practices, except for filling out the self-report form to monitor the reading process and progress. Reading is its own reward, but in order to encourage them to read more in their tight schedule, the teacher-researcher adopted Hitosugi and Day’s suggestion (2004) of giving extra credit to them. As readers, the participants were free to choose what they want to read, read as much and fast as possible and needed to use their ears and eyes at the same time. Though a few of them, in the reaction questionnaire, proposed the teacher-researcher ask them to read the same e-book every time or have more control over their reading, many of them liked the way she implemented the e-book ERP free from pressure, limitation, tests and post-reading activities. As a teacher, she learned to be quiet to be a role model of a
reader in class, but oriented and guided them when they encountered problems or difficulties in reading. The participant Joan mentioned in her self-report form that she preferred to read at school because the teacher would teach her how to guess the meaning of known words from the context, and through some practice, she could be able to do so by herself.
In addition to the nature of e-books as well as the principles for implementing ERPs, the amount of reading might also play a role in the participants’ attitudinal change. Surprisingly, after conducting a Pearson-Correlation test, the teacher-researcher found that there was no correlation between the participants’
attitudinal change (the means gained on the posttest) and the amount of reading, which meant those who read more e-books did not necessarily gained more means on the posttest and those who read less did not gained fewer means, either. Nevertheless, the amount of reading was significantly correlated to their scores on the pretest at the confidence level of .01 (Pearson Correlation=.446**) and on the posttest at .05 (Pearson Correlation=.386*). One thing to be noticed was that most of those with high or increasing reading amount scored high on the posttest of the reading attitude scale;
however, e-books also enabled those with low reading amount to score high on the posttest, for they also had a pleasant and successful experience of reading English e-books. According to Asraf and Ahmad (2003), the more one reads, the easier reading becomes. In this present study, the participants also had such an experience, and, the more they read, the more they learned; the more they learned, the more confident they became. Then, it was more likely that they would enjoy reading in English and develop lifelong reading habits (Adam & Wild, 1997; Alexander, 1991;
Gambrell, 1996; Hafiz & Tudor, 1989). The process of reading, therefore, can be concluded with the following four dynamic stages: read increasingly, read easily, read happily and, finally, read regularly.