Reading digital texts: obstacles to using digital resources

Abstract

Purpose Digital texts are increasingly widespread and research is needed on how students use digital texts, particularly in school-based classwork. The purpose of this study is to challenges persistent myths about young people’s affinity with digital tools by investigating the factors that condition or limit the ways students interact with and respond to digital web-based texts. Design/methodology/approach Two 12th grade English classes, 21 students in all, produced written responses to a digital text. Following a preliminary analysis of student writing, 7 students, representing diverse reading backgrounds, were interviewed. Content units were used as a unit of analysis for both interviews and written data. Following open coding, 14 initial codes were condensed into 3 categories, namely, routines, tools and beliefs. Findings This study suggests that for students to see digital textual resources as significant, they must be guided to engage with these features. Classroom routines, the tools used in teaching and learning reading and the beliefs students hold about their school-based reading can restrict student uptake of digital features of texts. Instruction must be adapted to include teaching on digital texts. Originality/value Students interact with digital texts daily, yet explicit teaching on reading digital texts presents particular demands. This study contributes to understanding the challenges faced by students and teachers when they grapple with texts in different forms.

“I Drew Myself Right There”: third grade girls restorying for visual justice

“…Restorying is often student-initiated and can be supported through accessing technological tools to critically engage with socially conscious topics. Many children possess advanced knowledge of how to engage with digital tools (Kesson, 2020) and experiences with these tools provide a platform for them to share beyond their classroom with the global community (Price-Dennis et al, 2016). Therefore, multimodal approaches in language arts classrooms, which can incorporate print, visual images and technological tools provide opportunities to "reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse" (Thomas and Stornaiuolo, 2016, p. 313).…”

“…Using their Chromebooks, students also used the Web-based platform Seesaw to create videos and post discussions. Notably, some critical multimodal literacy practices that students engaged were not teacher or researcher directed and were extensions of their own technology practices (Kesson, 2020); while Angela had asked them to record themselves describing their visual images, some studentsincluding the three girls featured in this articlewent beyond this and posted discussion questions to each other, created videos that extended the readaloud, and shared images from picturebooks with their comments and ideas.…”

Factors Influencing Digital Reading Behaviour of Students

“…Digital reading provides numerous strategies for skimming, scanning, recognizing cognates, guessing, foreseeing, inferencing, and differentiating main ideas from supporting ideas. Digital reading requires certain abilities and guidance, which will be utilised to find, locate, access, and manipulate e-resources, and to interpret and evaluate the digital texts as well [6][7] . Researchers have argued that, although the young generation spends considerable time for reading e-resources, they tend to skim and browse for information on the Internet rather than read intensively 8 .…”