6533b856fe1ef96bd12b2990

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Paper-bound online readers: Revisiting reading strategies of foreign language learners

subject

description

Making sense of any text written in a foreign language is a dynamic and demanding activity that engages decoding and comprehending processes. Meaning construction entails comprehension monitoring as quite often foreign language users may be confused by the information they have decoded, and then they have to identify the possible sources of confusion. Reading strategies – plans for solving problems with the construction of meaning (Duffy 1993) – play an important role in monitoring text comprehension, both printed on and electronic. Since the electronic media have entered educational, professional and private spaces where they coexist with printed matter, it is crucial to understand how and when foreign language learners use reading strategies when handling printed and electronic texts as this may have important implications for learning and reading in any language. The study reported in this reveals that the participants are mostly problem solving strategy users though they also use global and support reading strategies. They prefer to read versions of academic texts because this allows them to better concentrate on what they read and does not cause eye strain. Reading in a foreign language is a challenge mostly in terms of focusing on the text (motivation), and in terms of linguistic as well as conceptual difficulty of the texts.