Does E-Reading Enhance Reading Fluency?

Rahima S. Akbar, Hanan A. Taqi, Abdulmohsin A. Dashti and Taiba M. Sadeq

English Language Teaching, 2015, vol. 8, issue 5, 195

Abstract: Extensive reading is reading as much as possible, for one’s own pleasure, at a difficulty level at which one can read smoothly and quickly. In the domain of reading, this paper investigates the effect of extensive reading from e-books, through utilizing a number of downloadable reading application programs on the students’ e-devices, as opposed to traditional book-reading in an ESL context. It aims at providing answers as to how e-book reading affects the students’ reading rate, their reading comprehension, and their attitudes to reading. A group of 40 freshman female students studying in the College of Basic Education, in the English Department participated in the study. Students’ writing diaries together with two questionnaires made up the tools of the study. The data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings indicate that e-reading may accelerate the progress of the students’ reading rate, which might be due to the utilization of the reading application features that trains the students to practice faster rates of reading. As for the comprehension level, the students reported lower levels when they read from an e-resource. On the other hand, the students’ attitudes towards e-reading tend to be less positive when compared to conventional book reading, due to a number of extraneous factors that were not part of the inherent nature of the e-reading activity. Future studies on e-reading, whereby confounding factors will be rigorously controlled for are highly recommended to reach out more conclusive findings on the matter.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/download/47961/25746 (application/pdf)
https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/view/47961 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ibn:eltjnl:v:8:y:2015:i:5:p:195

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in English Language Teaching from Canadian Center of Science and Education Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Canadian Center of Science and Education ().