How do students read on the Internet in the new technological era?

Abstract

The principal focus of this investigation is to discuss how EFL students read on the Internet after completing a Cybertask. Our main concern is to find out how students read on the Internet in the new technological era. Nowadays we are going through a great technological revolution that makes us being concerned about the English Language as a Foreign Language education. For this reason, we deem necessary to apply our knowledge during the reading process (Schmar-Dobler, 2003) and promote the reading capacity of texts (Luzón & Ruiz-Madrid, 2008; Luzón, Ruiz-Madrid & Villanueva, 2010; Girón-García & Gaspar, 2012). Furthermore, this paper focuses on two features: (a) how students handle the great amount of information they find on the Web; and (b) how they select the most appropriate information according to their task objectives. In order to get relevant results, a group of university students of the English Studies degree at ‘Universitat Jaume I’ (Spain) worked on an English task-based activity (i.e. ‘Cybertask’) during their class regular time. They also took into account a number of Websites provided by the teacher and following they completed a Self-Assessment Questionnaire in order to evaluate both their task process and task result. Finally, the main aim is to analyse how students read (‘Reading Modes’) in a digital context when they face task-based activities (Girón-García, 2013). However, our study goes beyond the classification of Internet users (‘Knowledge Seekers’, ‘Feature Explorers’, and ‘Apathetic Hypertext Users’) (Anderson-Inman & Hoerney, 1993; Bowdish et al., 1994; Lawless & Kulikowich, 1996).