Research On EFL Learners' Reading Effectiveness Based On Paper And Screen Mediums

With the proliferation of electronic resources and products,screen reading has pervaded every aspect of life,with learning environment no exception.Exploring its reading effectiveness is of paramount importance,especially for pedagogical purposes.Although comparisons between paper and screen reading have been active for a long time,consistent and conclusive results are not achieved.Moreover,among the previous studies,fewer have focused on Chinese EFL(English as a Foreign Language)learners in spite of their great proportion of the total EFL learners.Besides,the assessment indicators and research methods used were relatively unitary.In view of these promising prospects,the author of this paper conducted the present research with the purpose of enriching the pool of relative studies in theory and practice and casting some light on education.This paper takes reading effectiveness as an assessment indicator which is observed from two dimensions: reading speed and reading comprehension.The latter is furtherly decomposed into three levels based on Kintch's(2013)constructionintegration model(CI).Altogether,this paper is concentrated on answering the following two questions:1)Are there any differences between EFL learners' reading speed based on reading mediums?2)Are there any differences between EFL learners' comprehension based on reading mediums? If there are,to what levels and what degree?Centering on these questions,the author designed and carried out experiments and interviews,combing quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis in order to offer more comprehensive and testable answers.Fifty-five English major students from a technology university in China voluntarily took part in the present study.The whole process was composed of two parts.With regards to experiments,the very same participant needed to finish the reading material and its corresponding tasks in the order of paper reading and tasks,screen reading and tasks,screen reading and tasks and paper reading and tasks.After all the tests,data for reading speed and three levels of reading comprehension were collected,which can be transformed from reading time,word recognition scores,main idea scores and inference scores through several steps of calculations.The last three were respectively corresponding to surface structure level,textbase level and situation model level of Kintch's(2013)CI model.As to the interview part,it can be further subdivided into semi-structured one-on-one face-to-face interviews and Wechat group interview.After the permission of the participants,face-to-face interview data were recorded in a recording pen while the online Wechat group interview data were kept in the form of screenshots for coding after transcription.Finally,the average values of the two paper and two screen tests were compared and analyzed by the virtue of spss22.0,and the interview data were coded and analyzed.Corresponding to the research questions,the present study draws the following two conclusions:1)EFL learners read significantly faster from screen than from paper.2)Holistically considered,paper reading is better for comprehension.Nevertheless,when viewing from Kintch's three levels of text comprehension,there is no significant difference between the two mediums in surface structure level in spite of the subtle superior in paper.With regards to the textbase level,paper version is significantly better than the corresponding screen.Whereas the third situation model level demonstrates an opposite result,with higher scores for screen.Considering these results,it is still hard to say which medium is more effective for EFL learners' reading as the ideal state should be obtaining as much as understanding of the text with least possible time.As far as the author is concerned,teachers in their instruction work or readers struggling with their reading choices are advised to alternatively switch between these two mediums according to different reading purposes and reading tasks.