The Effectiveness of Adopting E-Readers to Facilitate EFL Students' Process-Based Academic Writing

English as Foreign Language (EFL) students face additional difficulties for academic writing largely due to their level of language competency. An appropriate structural process of writing can help students develop their academic writing skills. This study explored the use of the e-readers to facilitate EFL students' process-based academic writing. The experiment was conducted in the graduate level class entitled “Technical and Scientific English Writing” in a northern Taiwan university for the entire semester, about 5 months. Students’ perceptions, writing outcome and portfolio were collected and were later evaluated. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted in this study. Empirical data were collected and analyzed to report on the performance of EFL students’ academic writing with and without the e-readers. Findings indicate that e-readers affected the process of reading, annotation, and information retrieval with the unique functions. For EFL students’ academic writing, e-reader can be a tool for reciprocal peer review that aided academic writing. Moreover, e-readers are significantly beneficial for students’ academic writing progress compared to the conventional paper-based materials. The functions of e-readers can assist students’ writing process and make the recursive circle of steps more efficiently. E-readers could afford creating a better writing environment in the process-based writing approach. This study further discussed the role of e-readers in the academic writing classroom and further discusses how to use e-readers to facilitate academic writing in the classroom.