Factors That Influence Online Reading: An Investigation into EFL Students' Perceptions

When reading traditional texts printed on paper, students start reading from the top left-hand corner and finish at the bottom right-hand corner. Their eyes move in a straight line, which is a linear activity. However, when reading hypertexts, students can click a hyperlink to find out certain information. As they click the various hyperlinks, they are often taken to a different web page. Online reading is thus not a linear activity anymore. This study investigated how online reading affected EFL students’ reading comprehension and reported the difficulties eighty-eight Taiwanese EFL students enrolled in the first-year Freshman English course at a comprehensive university in northern Taiwan encountered during the process of online reading. The results show that students disliked reading from computer screens. The factors that affected students when reading hypertext were font size and background color of web pages. The major difficulties included eyestrain, inability to take notes or underline text, and skipping lines when reading hypertext on computer screens. Results also support the claim that students found hypertext reading to be more difficult than linear reading.