An Investigation of Young EFL Learners’ Use of Online Reading Strategies

Tablet PCs have become a powerful instructional device for students to read and write stories (Robin, 2008). To assist young learners to cultivate efficient learning strategies in the early ages, students in the current study were guided to read three authentic online storybooks and then write their own digital stories with the Android applications. The study aims to investigate Taiwanese elementary school students' use of online reading strategies, and their relationship with students' performance on reading proficiency tests. The target population consisted of upper-grade learners (n = 83) at an elementary school in Taipei City. The instruments were a modified Survey of Reading Strategy (M-SORS) questionnaire with 30 items (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002), and a reading proficiency test in the General English Proficiency Test developed by The Language Training & Testing Center (LTTC). Major findings were as follows: Taiwanese elementary school students used online reading strategies at medium level; among the three types of online reading strategies, young learners tended to rely on problem solving strategies the most, followed by support strategies, and global reading strategies; (3) problem solving strategies were proven to significantly correlate with students' performance on vocabulary and sentence structure, cloze, and reading comprehension test, and (4) there was a significant difference between higher and lower reading proficiency learners' use of online reading strategies, particularly in the use of problem solving strategies. Pedagogical implications of the findings and suggestion for future research are discussed.