CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
As a teacher involved in technological supports for second/foreign language (L2) learners, I have long desired to find a useful connection between language teaching and the educational potential of computers. In particular, I would like to see how the relatively new interactive capability of computers and an Internet-based learning environment can improve reading skills of L2 learners. Based on current L2 reading pedagogy and L2 reading strategy research, this study aims to construct a technology-enhanced reading program by integrating L2 research findings. It is hoped that this program will help English as a foreign language (EFL) readers overcome language deficiencies and achieve better reading comprehension as they read online texts. In addition, this study further investigates the types of online reading strategies that EFL learners use across proficiency levels and the connection between strategy use and reading comprehension. These findings will help reading teachers and web-based program designers understand how best to prepare students to meet the emerging literacy demands of our digital age.
Background and Rationale
Reading is an essential skill for all language learners. With strengthened reading skills, learners of English can make better progress in other areas of language learning (Anderson, 2003). Reading should be an active and a fluent process in which readers interact with the text to construct meaning. Reading should be interactive, with bottom-up and top-down processing working at the same time. Bottom-up processing, which includes word recognition, knowledge of syntactic structure, fluency in processing words, sentences and discourse cues, should be reinforced by top-down skills, such as applying background knowledge, inferencing, and predicting (Grabe &
Stroller, 2002). However, for most L2 readers, this interactive way of processing does
not successfully take place as it does in their first language (L1) context. The average L2 learners’ reading abilities are much lower than those of their L1. The gap between L1 and L2 reading abilities among second language readers poses challenges for reading instruction. Teachers need to teach students how to transfer what they have mastered in L1 into L2 reading: increasing vocabulary, strengthening formal discourse structure knowledge, cultivating background knowledge, and monitoring their own learning. These reading skills and strategies need to be explicitly taught in class.
Since the mid-1970s, the role of strategies in L2 learning has received close attention. The consistent finding of this research is that learners actively use specific strategies to accomplish their learning goals. The term “strategy” refers to “deliberate actions that learners select and control to achieve desired goals or objectives”
(Winograd & Hare, 1988: 123). A strategy comprises “the mental operations involved when readers purposefully approach a text to make sense of what they read” (Barnett, 1989: 66). These mental operations can be conscious acts controlled by the reader, such as taking notes; or unconscious processes performed by the reader, such as thinking about what he/she already knows before reading.
Prospective L2 readers use various strategies and choose appropriate ones to improve performance in learning and communicating in L2. As strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, and more effective (Oxford, 1990), there is an active involvement of L2 readers in selecting and using specific strategies (Anderson, 2003). On the other hand, there is no single set of processing strategies that determines the success of reading in L2 reading tasks (Anderson, 1991). Strategies are not used in an isolated way; rather, readers need to know how to use a strategy successfully and to orchestrate its use with other strategies.
As the effective use of reading strategies has been recognized as an important
way to increase reading comprehension, a plethora of studies in the L2 reading literature has generated lists of paper-reading strategies to help students read more efficiently (Anderson, 1991; Block, 1986; Chang, 1998; Cheng, 1998; Cohen, 1998;
Grabe, 1999; Hosenfeld, 1984; Oxford, 1990; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995; Sarig, 1987; Sheorey & Mokhtari, 2001). However, relatively few studies have reported on L2 online reading strategies (Anderson, 2003; Chang, 2005; Tseng, 1998) and the effects of strategy use on different levels of reading comprehension (Brantmeier, 2000;
Singhal, 2003). With increasing globalization and the rise of the World Wide Web (WWW), online reading has become a major source of input for L2 readers (Anderson, 2003; Hanson-Smith, 2003b). The Internet has entered L2 classrooms faster than books, television, or any other forms of communication technologies (Coiro, 2005;
Leu, 2002). The emergence of new technologies has redefined the nature of literacy, which has expanded from traditional notions of reading to encompass abilities “to learn, comprehend and interact with technology in a meaningful way” (Pianfetti, 2001:
256).
A growing body of research has suggested that students require new comprehension strategies to read and learn from text on the Internet (Coiro, 2005;
Sutherland-Smith, 2003). Reading is not restricted to printed materials only; instead, students need to frequently consult online materials to find information and to meet this emerging literacy demand. The new text format introduced by the Internet provides both new supports and new challenges (Coiro, 2003). Students may take advantage of graphics, images, and audio-visual content to understand a text, but they may be confused or overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information and varied forms of presentation online. To cope with electronic texts, which encompass online navigation, digital media, and authentic computer-mediated communication, students need more than paper-reading strategies; they need to be equipped with specific
strategies, such as the ability to navigate, and the skill to make critical decisions among a complex combination of hyperlinks to find the information they want.
Despite the importance of mastering online reading strategies to cope with the reading difficulties mentioned above, EFL learners in Taiwan are reported to be overwhelmed with English online materials on the Internet (Chen, 2003, 2004). They have trouble understanding the authentic text because of its length, its complex content, and its unabridged vocabulary. Oftentimes students get lost in a labyrinth of hyperlinks. From my own experience of carrying out web-based reading projects with students for years, I have found that students who intuitively know that reading online materials empowers their knowledge construction still withdraw from reading English websites. They have complained to me about getting totally lost in surfing hyperlink-rich and media-rich English web pages so they feel that the only thing they can do is to look up every word in the dictionary. Most of the time, even when they have looked up all the unknown words, they still cannot arrive at the text’s meaning.
The sad fact is that students in Taiwan have good computer literacy, but they still have problems coping with electronic literacy (Liou, 2004). In fact, EFL learners here in Taiwan lack the necessary strategies to cope with reading online English texts.
Knowing the Internet’s importance in making knowledge accessible and its powerful potential for L2 learning and teaching, I began to wonder whether there are ways for L2 teachers to prepare students for this new form of literacy. How, for example, can teachers harness learners’ electronic skills for language learning? How can teachers equip students with proper strategies to cope with online reading? Is there a way for teachers to turn webpages’ hyperlinking features, which often serve as stumbling blocks for students, into facilitative devices that can smooth out the online reading process? In an electronic era, teachers need to inform students how to take advantage of modern technology to enhance their reading skills and to broaden their
horizons by accessing texts with varied forms of input.
Purpose of the Study
The purposes of this study are threefold. First, this study aims to delineate EFL learners’ patterns of online reading strategies. The Internet is a fast-growing medium for reading and writing, and learners’ reading behaviors with this new medium have not yet been fully explored. Understanding the online reading strategy patterns of EFL learners will inform reading teachers and web-based program designers how best to prepare students to cope with new forms of reading in a digital age. The second purpose of this study is to investigate how reading comprehension is affected by strategy use, and which strategies work best for EFL learners while reading online texts. The third purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a technology-enhanced reading program, English Reading Online, constructed to fulfill the first two purposes of this study.
In order to investigate EFL learners’ online reading strategies, a web-based reading program, English Reading Online, was designed and developed. This program includes 15 reading aids based on reading strategy patterns found in L2 reading literature. When students use this program to read online texts, their navigating behaviors are tracked by this program. Therefore, English Reading Online can serve as a tool to collect students’ strategy use while reading online; it can also help students overcome language deficiencies and achieve better reading comprehension.
This study will address the following research questions:
1. What are the online reading strategies used by EFL learners in Taiwan?
2. What is the relationship between reading comprehension and stategy use?
3. What are students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the online reading program, English Reading Online?
Significance of the Study
The findings of patterns of strategy use will contribute to the research literature in second language reading, focusing primarily on the use of online reading strategies.
Most L2 reading research studies have addressed only paper-reading strategies, with just a few studies reporting on online reading strategies. Even less common, however, are empirical investigations into online strategy use among EFL learners in Taiwan.
The finding of the current study will be useful to uncover the online reading strategy use, and will contribute directly to the planning of reading strategy instruction in the L2 curriculum.
Strategies that are reported to be the most frequently used and to be most helpful in aiding reading comprehension will inform L2 reading teachers how best to prepare students for the new form of reading in a digital age. L2 teachers will be able to take advantage of strategy-based instruction to help students increase metacognitive awareness and strategy use while reading. In addition, the comparison of the strategy use between the high-proficiency and low-proficiency groups will provide information on how to teach online reading strategies to students with diverse language proficiency levels. Furthermore, as some strategies are more successful than others in facilitating reading comprehension, the most successful strategies will be encouraged to promote a strategic stance in L2 classrooms.
This study develops and uses a technology-enhanced reading program that will directly contribute to L2 learning, teaching, and research. This user-friendly reading forum with comprehensive reading aids will benefit L2 readers who are overwhelmed by the complicated content of online authentic materials and can also build strategy repertoires for L2 readers. Besides, the reading aids provided in this program will enable teachers to select online authentic texts for course materials, introduce supportive reading strategies to supplement L2 reading processes, and monitor
students’ reading performances. With the help of this program, teachers will realistically meet their students’ needs in a digital age when new canons of literacy involving text combined with other visual/audio media are emerging. Moreover, the design of this program with all the built-in strategy functions can complement other traditional methods such as think-aloud protocol and observation; it can also become an alternative approach to collect reading strategy data.
In this chapter, I have described the rationale and background for constructing a technology-enhanced reading program investigating EFL learners’ online reading strategies. I have also stated the purposes of the current study and outlined the possible contributions that this study can make in L2 reading classes. In the following chapter, I will examine research literature related to second language reading and the application of technology in L2 reading classes.
