How Do Students Read on the Internet in the New Technological Era?
How Do Students Read on the Internet in the New Technological Era?

Summary/Abstract: The principal focus of this investigation is to discuss how EFL students read on the Internet after completing a Cybertask. Our main concern is to find out how students read on the Internet in the new technological era. Nowadays we are going through a great technological revolution that makes us being concerned about the English Language as a Foreign Language education. For this reason, we deem necessary to apply our knowledge during the reading process (Schmar-Dobler, 2003) and promote the reading capacity of texts (Luzón & Ruiz-Madrid, 2008; Luzón, Ruiz-Madrid & Villanueva, 2010; GirónGarcía & Gaspar, 2012). Furthermore, this paper focuses on two features: (a) how students handle the great amount of information they find on the Web; and (b) how they select the most appropriate information according to their task objectives. In order to get relevant results, a group of university students of the English Studies degree at ‘Universitat Jaume I’ (Spain) worked on an English task-based activity (i.e. ‘Cybertask’) during their class regular time. They also took into account a number of Websites provided by the teacher and following they completed a Self-Assessment Questionnaire in order to evaluate both their task process and task result. Finally, the main aim is to analyse how students read (‘Reading Modes’) in a digital context when they face task-based activities (Girón-García, 2013). However, our study goes beyond the classification of Internet users (‘Knowledge Seekers’, ‘Feature Explorers’, and ‘Apathetic Hypertext Users’) (Anderson-Inman & Hoerney, 1993; Bowdish et al., 1994; Lawless & Kulikowich, 1996).

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