Reading

Generally, reading skill in a language classroom is considered to be very important, because without this knowledge, students are not likely to be successful in the typical language class especially in EFL situations. Conceptions of reading have undergone different changes over time from the belief that reading is a passive skill to the idea that reading is psycholinguistic decoding of letters and words, demanding skimming, scanning, and guessing words from contexts (Chastain, 1988). Reading from the screen is less a passive act of decoding a message from a single authoritative author and more a self-conscious act of creating knowledge from a variety of sources (Landow, 1992).

If we consider reading a social practice that happens in particular sociocultural contexts (Gee, 1996) then in this information era which is dominated by English language and majority of people in the world to some extent are familiar with the ABC of reading, teachers of English language are expected to go beyond the mechanistic view of reading, familiarizing students with the strategies to tackle the problems they encounter while they are surfing the net.

In light of the Internet, readers encounter different relevant or irrelevant articles and books, different people from different walks of life, and different pieces of reliable and unreliable news, which demand new skills to analyze them, and as Warschauer (2000) stated, readers should be equipped with the following skills:

– Finding the information to read in the first place (through Internet searches, etc);

– Rapidly evaluating the source, credibility, and timelines of information once it has been located;

– Rapidly making navigational decisions as to whether to read the current page of information, pursue links internal or external to the page, or revert back to further searching;

– Making on-the-spot decisions about ways to save or catalogue part of the information on the page or the complete page;

– Organizing and keeping track of electronic information that has been saved.

These may seem like esoteric skills for a class of beginning English learners who are still trying to figure out how to decode simple words. But as English expands in the 21^st century as a language of international communication, the number of learners who master basic English skills will grow.

Increasing number of learners throughout the world will find themselves in the situation of secondary students in many European countries today, where the challenge is not so much to achieve basic decoding skills but rather to use English for the types of complex global communication discussed earlier in this article.

None of these types of skills are completely new of course. The need for critical, active, and interpretive reading has been an important part of print literacy as well. Moreover, the vast amount of information available on the Internet and its hypertextual organization speed up changes in the nature of reading which were already occurring in the age of print, and make these kinds of critical reading skills all the more essential.

To be equipped with these skills doesn’t mean that while you are reading from pages you don’t need to be equipped with these skills, but it means while reading from screen, these abilities are more essential.

By the way, while reading from the screen you need to be familiar with different skills, because it may have audio, video, and icons. And only a multiliterate person can deal with these issues and be successful.

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New media and the culture of learning	\|	Writing

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