Academic Purposes Digital Reading

Abstract

Digital reading is part of English as a foreign language (EFL) students' academic activity in this digital era. Exploring the practices of academic digital reading and the challenges the students face are the purposes of this qualitative study. The participants were the undergraduate EFL students in a public university in Jambi who were in the process of developing the ideas for their thesis. The data were taken through informal interview in WhatsApp group, questionnaire through google form, and focus group discussion through zoom meeting. Qualitative analysis on the data shows that the students practiced reading digitally for their academic assignment and task. They applied certain strategies such as skimming, rereading the text, highlighting and note taking, and generating keywords. During their reading practice, students faced some challenges that can be grouped into three intervening issues. The first is reading process itself, the second is reading in digital environment, and the last is reading in EFL context. In consequence, these issues influenced the students' comprehension toward the text, such as determining the main ideas and understanding the details. Based on the challenges found, it is important to equip students with digital reading strategies, and information literacy skills.