Online Searching in English as a Foreign Language

Online searching is a central element of internet users' information behaviors. Searching is usually executed in a user’s native language, but searching in English as a foreign language is often necessitated by the lack of content in languages that are underrepresented in Web content. This paper reports results from a study of searching in English as a foreign language and aims at understanding this particular group of users' behaviors. Searchers whose native language is not English may have to resort to queries in English in support of their information needs due to the lack or low quality of the web content in their own language. However, when searching for information in a foreign language, users face a unique set of challenges that are not present for native language searching. We studied this problem through qualitative research methods and report results from focus groups in this paper. The results reported in this paper describe typical problems foreign language searchers face, the differences in informationseeking behavior in English and in the participants’ native language, and advice and ideas shared by the focus group participants about how to search effectively and efficiently in English.