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Running head: ONLINE OR TRADITIONAL READING 1

Online or Traditional Reading – Preferred Reading Method for CSUMB Students

Muhammad Farooq

California State University, Monterey Bay

March 4, 2017

IST624 Research Design & Methods

Dr. Sarah Tourtellotte


ONLINE OR TRADITIONAL READING 2

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).
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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

deliberate, thorough, and purposeful, (Carioli, Peru 2016).

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
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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

using various tools at the same time.

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

skimming through the torrent of information online.”

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
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used to reading simple sentences online. She calls it “twitter brain” that is not exposed to the

complex structure, risking humans’ ability to read the convoluted prose.

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.
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Resources

Carioli, S., Peru, A. (2016) The Think-Aloud Approach: A Promising Tool for Online Reading

Comprehension. Retrieved November 06, 2017 from

http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1250&context=jmle

Coiro, J. (2009). Rethinking Online Reading Assessment. Retrieved November 09, 2017

Lai, L. M. (2017). Reading Strategy Awareness Training To Empower Online Reading.

Retrieved November 09, 2017 from file:///Users/umer/Downloads/291-716-1-PB%20(1).pdf

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

November 09, 2017.

Morrison, R. (2016). Virtual Reality in the Language Learning Classroom. Retrieved November

06, 2017 from http://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.php/mwatch/article/view/1743/1351

Tanner, M. J. (2014). Digital vs. print: Reading comprehension and the future of the book. SLIS

Student Research Journal, 4(2). Retrieved from http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/slissrj/vol4/iss2/6

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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Retrieved February 11, 2018, from

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

Reading in the US. Advances in Social Sciences Journal, 5, 126-137.

http://scholarpublishing.org/index.php/ASSRJ/article/view/4108/2491

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