E-Government and the Digital Divide: A Study of English-as-a-Second-Language Users’ Information Behaviour

Abstract

Internet-based technologies are increasingly used by organisations and governments to offer services to consumers and the public in a quick and efficient manner, removing the need for face-to-face conversations and human advisors. Despite their obvious benefits for most users, these online systems may present barriers of access to certain groups in society which may lead to information poverty.In this study we consider the information behaviour of ten ESL (English as a Second Language) participants as they conduct four search tasks designed to reflect actual information seeking situations. Our results suggest that, despite a perception that they have a good understanding of English, they often choose documents that are only partially or tangentially relevant. There were significant differences in the behaviour of participants given their perceived confidence in using English to perform search tasks. Those who were confident took riskier strategies and were less thorough, leading to them bookmarking a larger proportion of non-relevant documents. The results of this work have potentially profound repercussions for how e-government services are provided and how second-language speakers are assisted in their use of these.

A Comparative Study of Native and Non-native Information Seeking Behaviours

“…This was echoed by native participant B1, who explained that assistance would be used (in other settings) to complete queries to save time. A comparison of queries, classified based on the definitions of Chu et al [8],found that there were no differences in the distribution of queries submitted across both groups, with new queries and reformulations (66.43% for non-natives and 68.91%) making up the majority of submitted queries, despite being contrary to the initial study [8], this has been identified previously [5].…”

“…This raises questions about users whose native language is not English, and the barriers they face if governmental services are solely accessible on-line. Brazier and Harvey [5] studied the search behaviours and performance of ESL users when given search tasks that new immigrants to a country might need to perform and found that, while most users were very confident of their English language searching abilities, they did not perform very well.…”

“…In this work we integrate elements of the literature mentioned to specifically investigate the search behaviours and performance of both native and non-native searchers on contextually-relevant tasks, taken unadulterated from the work of Brazier and Harvey [5,6]. In doing so, we can gain a better understanding of how e-services should be developed and provisioned such that they are of benefit to all users, regardless of whether or not English is their mother tongue.…”

“…It is unsurprising that relevance of the tasks for natives are lower than those of non-natives considering the method in which the tasks were formulated [5]. However, it is interesting to note that, despite there being no native English speaker participation in the topic selection, no one topic was deemed completely irrelevant, with the housing task of most and the digital by default task of least relevance to both groups.…”

Deep learning enabled cross‐lingual search with metaheuristic web based query optimization model for multi‐document summarization

“…Several investigators have organized the effects of language skills on monitoring search behavior of clients with many other languages as native. 15 Furthermore, Brazier and Harvey 16 employed the effect on language skills of investigation attitude. Now, four search operations have been created and calculated the pre and post search information for finding the process reputation.…”