Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Muhammad Farooq
March 4, 2017
Introduction
With the revolution in the field of technology, a tremendous growth has been seen in
usage of digital devices for reading online, which raises fundamental questions if there is any
difference the way our mind processes the information based on the medium we choose to read.
This research focuses if there is any difference regarding CSUMB undergraduate students’
reading skills based on the preference they make to choose instructional delivery tool during
Reading Apprenticeship in CST300 Writing Lab Course in the Spring 2018. In this course,
students learn writing, presentation, research, and critical-thinking skills and each one of the
modality requires the student to do a lot of reading. Therefore, it provides a perfect opportunity
to find out difference between the activities that are done online and in person to see what
students prefer in terms of the delivery method to improve their reading skills.
Literature Review
There are various factors involved that help draw a line between online and traditional
reading. The online texts have various types and characteristics such as non-linear hypertexts,
multimedia texts, and interactive texts which make online reading different than traditional book
reading and that is why it is believed that online texts require a new type of literacy. The online
texts have different characteristics but learners do need to have the basic reading comprehension
skills and strategies to handle basic online reading tasks, Lai, L. M. (2017). Like the readers need
to have a strategy for reading comprehension for the traditional reading, they do need strategy
awareness training to facilitate and scaffold learners’ online reading tasks, and it is important for
the teacher to scaffold by modeling some important reading strategies, Lai, L. M. (2017).
ONLINE OR TRADITIONAL READING 3
The people with higher education are more likely to read e-books than traditional books.
It makes sense that highly educated people are more aware of the technological advancement,
that is why they tend to read online books more than the less educated people. People with higher
income also tend to read more e-books and people who visit a website of public library or use
apps of a public library are more likely to use e-books (Xin, Paul ,2018). Younger people with
higher income and higher education are more likely to prefer e-books over traditional books and
the number of e-readers have constantly been increasing over the last few years with the
advancement in the technology that resulted in smart phones and tablets (Xin, Paul ,2018).
Though there seem to be an influx of reading content available online, a little attention
is being paid to online reading comprehension in Europe as the most school teachers are not
trained on how to increase students’ proficiency in the online reading comprehension, (Carioli,
Peru 2016). Students are not being taught how to read the web as the studies conducted showed
that when the untrained readers were asked to read on the internet they just scrolled up and down
a web page without really reading anything. They picked up only key words, as a result their
comprehension was significant poorer than that of trained readers whose reading was more
There have not been many assessment tools designed especially for online reading. The
absence of the valid online reading comprehension assessment tools increases the reading
achievement gaps ( Leu et al., 2009). The internet has become a defining technology for literacy
and learning in the 21st century as the number of people using internet has increased over the last
decade or so. The students need a new set of skills to become a better online reader, depending
ONLINE OR TRADITIONAL READING 4
on the level of complexity of the tasks, as the world has failed to understand the internet as
online reading comprehension issue which led to policies that actually increased the gap among
poor and diverse learners( Leu et al., 2011). Coiro, J (2009) points out how reading
comprehension on the internet differs from the traditional reading from books, as need new skills
to read online effectively, such as sifting through disparate sources, synthesizing the most
reliable and relevant information within the sources and communicating with other students
There is an immense flow of information out there and browsing and scanning is
becoming a modern way to cope with this flow as people don’t have time to sit back and
consume information slowly and completely. However, it is also very important to note that the
online readers tend to spend a fair amount of time on browsing, scanning, keyboard spotting, and
more selective reading while less time is spent on in-depth reading. Robert Clowes (2017) puts
emphasis on interpreting deep reading as a broader network of activities which may help design
electronic media that preserves cognitive ability to read deep if there is any threat posed by the
hypertext. Michael S. Rosenwald shares the experiences of young students, who got used to
online reading, how they struggle to read from the book as they feel that “your eyes are passing
over the words but you are not taking in what they say.” According to him, the cognitive
scientists believe that human beings are developing a digital brain “with new circuits for
Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and
the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” is reported to have said that young
generation is losing the ability to deal with the convoluted syntax and construction as they are so
ONLINE OR TRADITIONAL READING 5
used to reading simple sentences online. She calls it “twitter brain” that is not exposed to the
Despite the fact that new comprehension theories have emerged in the recent years, there
is a need for a better definition to understand what it means to be a skilled online reader. In order
to know which students are better online readers, it is required to develop new or modify the
existing assessment tools to meet the requirements of the new digital age.
ONLINE OR TRADITIONAL READING 6
Resources
Carioli, S., Peru, A. (2016) The Think-Aloud Approach: A Promising Tool for Online Reading
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1250&context=jmle
Coiro, J. (2009). Rethinking Online Reading Assessment. Retrieved November 09, 2017
Leu, J. D., McVerry G. J., O'Byrne I. W., Zawilinski, L., Castek, J., & Hartman, D. K. (2009).
The New Literacies of Online Reading Comprehension and the Irony of No Child Left Behind:
Students who Require our Assistance the Most, Actually Receive it the Least. Retrieved
Morrison, R. (2016). Virtual Reality in the Language Learning Classroom. Retrieved November
Tanner, M. J. (2014). Digital vs. print: Reading comprehension and the future of the book. SLIS
Weissheimer, J., Godoy, M., Callipo, R., Leite, L., Leandro, D. C., Neto, N. A., . . . Oliveira, A.
(n.d.). Reading on mobile digital screens: does text presentation mode affect comprehension?
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http://www.periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/ojs/index.php/polifonia/article/view/6068/3932
Xin, G., Paul D. B., (2018). Who Reads E-Books? An Analysis Of Key Factors In E-Book
http://scholarpublishing.org/index.php/ASSRJ/article/view/4108/2491