The skill of reading undergoes dramatic changes due to the change of reading interface readers are exposed to. Readers who want to be active participants of knowledge society need to perceive it as more than just a receptive skill. The study aims to assess the condition of homo legens, diagnose what kind of reading interface preferences characterize 21st-century readers, how they respond to texts considering reading both digitally and in print, accepting or viewing critically the underlying ideology of the text. The analysis of the collected data attempts to determine if the reported preferences are conducive to the development of critical thinking skills for 21st-century literacy, which include understanding complex ideas, evaluating evidence, weighing alternative perspectives and constructing justifiable arguments.

Generative note taking, being one of the strategies applied to manage difficult texts, requires not only comprehension and selection of information but also production. The current study focuses on note taking formats for a text read with the intention to summarise. Its focal aim is to improve both practical and theoretical understanding of this activity. It involves 103 second year English Department students, investigating how readers of FL engage with complex texts, how they were instructed in note taking and what note taking strategies they employ for comprehending academic texts. The analysis of the collected data attempts to indentify how readers’(n=103)  translanguaging and transmedia (n=103) note taking formats help increase their engagement in and access to difficult texts in L2. It shows that the subjects have not transitioned from the paper interface to the digital one, since they still display the screen inferiority effect in their reading habits. The collected data shows that only some subjects (n=42/103) received some form of instruction in paper note taking techniques or digital applications facilitating note taking. The students were not able to enumerate more than 4 note taking applications which would be conducive to their formation of a coherent interpretation of the digital text they read. The author contends that overt note taking instruction in both paper and digital mode will create avenues for encouraging, interacting and engaging in reading. Instruction in that field needs to be modified with regard to digital note taking/annotating tools to make use of the note taking formats available for processing digitally interfaced texts.

The objective of the paper is to show how important it is not to assume that the reading skill remains stable after being learned. Hayashi (2017) emphasises that “if you don’t have the reading skills and if you learn history, physics or chemistry, you won’t understand the definitions,” which is why developing and monitoring reading skills well into 6th and 7th grades are required in a super-smart society. Pointedly, reading skills must be regularly practised and recycled to keep abreast with the influx of information a reader needs to process. One of the components of the reading skill is word knowledge (both form and meaning). As the present study strives to illustrate, defining and enumerating what it involves constitutes a major problem, even for English philology students. Therefore, programming languages of Web 3.0 are discussed in terms of mediating between academic (specialist) and pop-cultural (non-specialist) discourses, helping the reader to refine the content of the text they are exposed to. As the research shows, the algorithmic element of Semantic Web is helpful in taming the density of specialist texts, and it may ultimately serve a human to connect the dots of data and facts to create a base for knowledge as it offers openly accessible tools to determine inconsistencies of terminology to a wide audience of both specialist and non-specialist readers who can use appropriate skills, media and activities to evoke their personal response to science (research findings) which would otherwise be undecipherable due to its highly specialist lexis.

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