COMPUTERIZED READING
Computers have affected almost every part of our everyday lives, ranging from the labor market to personal activities. Directly or indirectly, the use of computers at school or university, as well as at home will impact learning and this trend will most likely continue into the future. By the time these youth enter the labor force, ICT literacy might no longer be a specialized skill (except for specific applications), but rather a necessary one for a successful career. However, it has been increasingly argued that computer technologies can support learning in a number of ways.
There are several types of computerized reading, based on reading activities, which are reading comprehension, restructuring of texts, matching or jigsaw reading, problem solving and new mode-computerized reading. Here, my partner, Nurhuda Bt Mohamad Nazri and I will explain about the computerized reading based on this website http://www.eslcafe.com/ . From our view, the types of computerized reading that were found in this website are mixture of incidental reading where all texts on screen, whether oriented towards reading or not, reading the text for real purpose, instruction type of reading, information reading, operational tasks and activity completion.
Many features of this website are considered to enhance reading comprehension skill, and multimedia is one of them. Multimedia refers to computer-based systems that use various types of content, such as texts, audios, videos, graphics, animations, and interactivity. The key concepts of multimedia are thus 'computer-based' and 'interactive'.
Besides that, this website is very interactive and can illustrate a concept through attractive animation, sound, and demonstration. It allows students to progress at their own pace and work individually or problem solve in a group. Apart from that, it provides immediate feedback, thus letting students know whether their answer is correct. If the answer is not correct, the program shows students how to answer the question correctly.
Apart from that, this website also offers a different type of activity and a change of pace from teacher-led or group instruction. Besides, the contents capture the students’ attention because the programs are interactive and engage the students’ spirit of competitiveness to increase their scores.
In addition, this website also allows students to feel more relax as they are directly facing the monitor instead of the whole class when answering the given task. Moreover, students will feel more comfortable and open to accept any mistakes or errors throughout the whole learning process, as the learning process is between the students themselves and the computer. This creates a non-threatening environment where the students lower their affective filter and hopefully more learning takes place.
Another advantage of using this website is that it provides authentic materials. Exploring the internet is like exploring the real world. Students will be able to listen, speak and read authentic materials that are essential for the learning of the language. To further illustrate, a discussion forum provided in this website will allow students to engage in real-life, authentic discussion. Students are able to communicate with first language speakers as well as second language speakers around the world. Students will be able to learn how to better express themselves, extract important ideas from the readings, and improve their language skill.
To conclude, multimedia is a great instructional component not only for vocabulary instruction, but also for reading comprehension. The positive effect that multimedia has on reading comprehension comes from the great advantage that online readers have over traditional printed readers: the possibility to enhance computerized texts with glosses in multimedia format. This is probably the reason why most studies dedicated to a computer-based approach to reading have focused on the usefulness of glosses in different formats to increase reading comprehension. The effects of multimedia-aided reading could create more proficient readers by offering a choice of various types of glosses to develop better vocabularies, greater background knowledge surrounding the text, and more effective reading strategies.
