Results of the reading log

The reading log aimed to monitor the experimental group’s progress in the reading program every week, allowing the researcher to discover the students’ reading behavior and gained more thorough information to support the quantitative data. Each student was required to turn in a reading log every Monday during the reading program; thus, the sum of the participants’ reading journals should be 664. Three of them didn’t submit their reading log in one of the eight weeks; therefore, the researcher received 661 copies in total.

Weekly goal-attaining. Since the study is to explore the development of students’

perceptions of their autonomy, the objectives of this reading program were decided by the participants. The participants were asked to set their own weekly reading goal, including the number and level of the e-books, and checked whether they achieved their goal or not every week. From the analysis of these reading logs, more than 80%

of the responses reported that the participants reached their weekly goal while less

than 20% of them indicated that the students failed to attain their reading goal (See Table 7).

Table 7. Percentages of Weekly Goal-attaining

Copies Percentages

Achieve reading goal 551 83.36%

Fail to achieve reading goal 110 16.64%

Total 661 100.00%

Number of e-books. From the participants’ reading logs during this program, the amount of reading was analyzed by two angles, one is weekly counts, the sum of the e-books read by the experimental group every week, and the other is the e-books read by individuals in total during the eight-week study. The results of the number of e-books the participants read by weekly counts are shown as Figure 7, and they unveiled some noteworthy information (See Table 8).

Table 8. The Number of e-books Students Read by Weekly Counts

Week Number of E-books Read Percentages

1 351 13.42%

2 386 14.76%

3 350 13.38%

4 343 13.11%

5 299 11.43%

6 325 12.42%

7 283 10.82%

8 279 10.66%

Total 2616 100.00%

From Table 8, it’s clear that the weekly number of e-books read by the students, ranging from 279 to 386 e-books, and the average volume of the e-books read by the

participants was more than 300 (M= 327). In Week 2, the number of e-books read reached its peak because the students were more familiar with the use of the online reading platform Raz-Kids, and that they were curious about the e-books. However, the number slightly decreased in the following three weeks; it rose slightly in Week 6, but diminished again in Week 7 and 8. The possible cause for the variation in the amount of reading observed might lie in the varied levels and lengths of the e-books as more difficult or longer ones would take them more time to finish reading and then gave rise to the decrease in the number of e-books read by the students.

In addition to the analysis by weekly counts for all participants, the number of e-books read could also be analyzed by the total volume of e-books read by individuals during the eight-week program. The results of the number of e-books read by individuals are illustrated as Table 9.

Table 9. The Sum of E-books Read by Individuals

As Table 9 shows, 83.14% of the participants read more than 20 e-books during the eight-week reading program, and it was clearly demonstrated that the students reading from 20 to 39 e-books (62.65%) occupied the major part of all. Furthermore, the top five readers read more than 60 e-books during the eight-week reading program;

The sum of E-books Read Numbers of Students Percentages

More than 60 5 6.02%

50-59 2 2.41%

40-49 10 12.05%

30-39 24 28.92%

20-29 28 33.74%

10-19 13 15.66%

Less than 10 1 1.20%

Total 83 100.00%

that is to say, they read around eight e-books each week. The volume of e-books that the top two readers read should be noted since one read 81 e-books, and the other even read 128 e-books; namely, they read over ten e-books each week during the program. However, only one participant read less than 10 books in eight weeks. The extremely opposite reading behavior shown by these participants on e-book reading would be paid more attention in the interview section to retrieve more detailed information on the development of students’ learner autonomy.

Reading level. As the online reading platform Raz-Kids furnished the participants with different levels of e-books, the students could freely choose e-books from Raz-Kids to read in terms of their English proficiency. The results of the variation in the participants’ reading levels during the eight-week program are displayed in Table 10.

Table 10. The Variation in Reading Levels

Variation in Reading Levels Number of Students Percentages

Easy Difficult 43 51.81%

Easy Difficult  Easy 6 7.23%

Easy Difficult  Easy Difficult 9 10.84%

Difficult  Easy 2 2.41%

Difficult  Easy  Difficult 6 7.23%

Same level 1 1.20%

Not the regular pattern 16 19.28%

Total 83 100.00%

From the analysis of the reading logs, over 50% of the participants (51.81%) read e-books from the easy to the difficult ones; namely, they improved their reading levels of e-books gradually during the eight weeks. Moreover, about 30% of the students (27.71%) tried to challenge themselves by reading more difficult levels but

found out those e-books were too arduous for them to understand, and the following variation of reading levels would be noteworthy. As these students had some difficulties in reading higher levels of e-books, nearly 10% of the students (9.64%) then chose to read easier e-books instead; the other almost 20% of the participants (18.07%), however, first selected the easier ones to read and then chose more higher-level e-books to read in the following weeks in order to challenge themselves again. It is also noted that no regular patterns of the variation in reading levels were found in around 20% of the participants (19.28%) for these readers chose e-books based on their interest or the topic of e-books rather than the levels of e-books.

Nevertheless, no matter what kind of the variation in reading levels the participants showed, nearly 90% (89.16%) of them ended up with a higher reading level in the eight-week reading program than the level they began to read in the first week (See Table 11), suggesting that most of the participants chose greater difficulty level of e-books to read at the end of the program.

Table 11. Percentages of Comparing Their Reading Level in Week 8 with Week 1 Reading Level in Week 8 Numbers of People Percentages

Higher reading level 74 89.16%

Same level 3 3.61%

Lower reading level 6 7.23%

Total 83 100.00%

What the students learned in reading. After reading e-books, the participants were required to write down what they learned in the reading logs every week during the program. The students’ responses were identified and categorized into quite a few aspects as shown in Table 12. As Table 12 presented, over 60% of the responses revealed that the participants learned the lexicon from reading (62.84%), especially

vocabulary (59.26%); furthermore, the second and third one are knowledge (16.73%) and grammar (10.27%). Some of the responses indicated they were able to learn morals of the stories and obtain some specific knowledge from the e-books. In addition to knowledge, the students reported they acquired some sentence patterns and grammatical structures during reading. Language skills were also identified to have been learned by the participants, reading skills (3.11%) in particular. It was noted that some students even learned some metacognitive strategies (2.27%) in the process of reading, which could monitor their performance and progress in reading. What was surprising is that two of the participants reported that they downloaded the application of Raz-Kids to their mobile devices to enjoy reading e-books when they were not able

to use the computer; therefore, it denoted that the online extensive reading program did tempt some students to read more and more e-books.

Table 12. Responses of What Students Learned from Reading.

Aspects Categories Counts Percentages

Language Vocabulary 496 59.26%

Phrase 30 3.58%

Grammar, sentence pattern 86 10.27%

Reading 26 3.11%

Difficulties the students encountered in reading. From the analysis of the responses, most of the responses (61.36%) unveiled that the participants found out that a few unfamiliar words and phrases appearing on the e-books would interrupt their reading comprehension. What’s more, based on the results presented in Table 13, it was obvious that some of the participants regarded unfamiliar grammatical structures and new sentence patterns as the barriers in reading (7.75%).

Table 13. Responses of the Difficulties Students Encountered in Reading.

Approximately 7% of the responses (7.22%) suggested that a number of students thought the level of the e-books they chose were too difficult for them to read. It is noted that about 5% of the responses (5.21%) showed that finishing reading comprehension questions was a big headache for some students since they were not able to understand what the questions meant or had difficulty in answering the questions. Also, as Table 13 displayed, some of the participants had trouble with listening comprehension (2.81%) for they couldn’t catch those words they heard in

Aspects Categories Counts Percentages

Language The Level of e-books is too difficult to read

54 7.22%

Vocabulary 421 56.28%

Phrase 38 5.08%

Grammar, sentence pattern 58 7.75%

Reading speed 10 1.34%

Listening 21 2.81%

Speaking 1 0.13%

Quiz 39 5.21%

Others 10 1.34%

None 96 12.84%

Total 748 100.00%

reading e-books. However, around 13% of the responses (12.83%) reported that some participants didn’t encounter any difficulties in reading because the e-books they selected were easier.

The students’ solutions to the difficulties in reading. In order to overcome these obstacles while reading e-books, the participants would try to find out a few solutions to the problems they encountered. As the results of their reading logs showed, most of them would try to employ language learning strategies to cope with their problems in reading. The strategies utilized by the students were categorized based on Oxford’s (1990) classification of language learning strategies, as Table 14 illustrated.

Table 14. Responses of Students’ Solutions to Difficulties in Reading

Aspects Categories Techniques Counts Percentages

Social Collaboration Ask others 126 15.87%

Others 5 0.63%

Total 794 100.00%

Based on what Table 14 presented, employing the cognitive strategies (67.76%) played an indispensable role in conquering these difficulties, especially with the use of resources to retrieve information (56.55%), including looking up in the online dictionaries, searching on the Internet (56.30%), as well as consulting grammar books (0.25%). The second most frequently used solution is to seek for collaboration (15.87%); in other words, some of the participants asked their classmates or teachers for help to know the meaning of unknown words, phrases or sentence patterns.

What was encouraging is that one of the students even reported that he read the identical book with one of his classmate simultaneously and then had a discussion on it, saying that it could save him a lot of time from hunting for the meaning of words or phrases. Moreover, the two students sometimes even answered the reading comprehension questions in tandem, figuring out which was the correct answer to them. They also shared the interesting parts of the e-books with each other in the process of reading, and the sharing made their reading much more delightful.

What’s more, about one-twelfth of the responses (8.82%) showed that some of the participants would exploit “practicing strategies” to do repeated reading for clarification or do more reading for improving their reading skills. Also, it was noteworthy that some students capitalized on compensation strategies (6.30%) while encountering unfamiliar words by making intelligent guesses, denoting that they guessed the meaning of words from the clues shown on the e-books (4.16%), such as pictures, animations, intonation, and contexts, or they just chose to skip the unknown words and kept reading (0.25%). Furthermore, some participants reporting that the e-books they chose were too arduous to comprehend, and several of them would rather select easier ones to read (1.51%) as a solution than other ways.

In a nutshell, the results of the participants’ weekly reading logs provided the researcher with much essential information about the process of reading e-books in

terms of their weekly goal-attaining, the number of e-books they read, the variation in reading levels, what they learned, difficulties they encountered and their solutions to the problems in reading. From the analysis of these reading logs, it suggested that over 80% of the responses indicated that the participants could set their weekly goals and strive to achieve them successfully; also, nearly half of the students read more than four books per week, reading e-books from the easy ones to more difficult ones.

Almost all of them held a positive attitude about learning from reading; what’s more, most of the students could identify their difficulties and come up with proper solutions. Therefore, it is evident that the online extensive reading program may be helpful to facilitate the participants’ to develop autonomy.