Reading on the internet: literacy and technology

For my online PGCE course I read Reading on the internet: the link between literacy and technology by Elizabeth Schmar-Dobler published by Reading Online - An electronic journal of the International Reading Association. The article raises the following question: How can we, as teachers, help our students use their reading strategies when using the internet?

Students need to know how to read and write not only “in the print world but also in the digital world.” Nowadays, students need to poses the skills of finding, analyzing and using the best information in the shortest time, and this means the use of computers and internet. Thus, the literacy skills learned at school need to include reading and writing on the internet.

To be a successful user / reader of the internet, students need to:
- be able to handle the huge volume of information found on the internet;
- be able to decide where the information needed is likely to be on a webpage;
- be able to read expository texts that explain, describe, and give information through the use of hyperlinks.

From my experience, when Thai students need to find information for a school project, they usually go to well-established websites, such as wikipedia, and print the whole article about the topic of research, even if only a small part of that article is relevant. Then they add a cover (on colorful paper sic!) with a title and their name and finally submit the patched up project to the teacher. On many occasions I have seen teachers accepting such “projects” just because it’s okay to plagiarize in Thailand. But, by letting the students (and parents) get away with this, we’re actually “teaching” the students bad research skills.

As I will teach English to the highest grade in my school next school year, I intend to spend some time teaching the students how to select relevant information from the internet. I will do this by showing them how to apply similar reading strategies as those used with print text reading.

Schmar-Dobler’s article suggests these reading strategies:
- activating prior knowledge
- monitoring comprehension
- repairing comprehension
- determining important ideas
- synthesizing
- drawing inferences
- asking questions

As the students are only in Grade 5, I’m not sure if they possess all the above reading strategies, but once they master them I “can begin to build the bridge connecting literacy and technology.”