When I set out to do my doctoral study in 2009, I was convinced that the affordances of these new digital texts was going to level the playing field in our schools. My theory was that much of our inequity in education had to do with access. Students who could readily access the textbooks and information of schools would succeed, while those who did not would struggle. Therefore, we just needed to make these texts more accessible to more students, and all students would have the means to do well.
I now realize that my thinking was, at best, a little incomplete. The beauty of completing the dissertation was that I began to realize the complexity of the situation. Not only did I come to the conclusion that our educational problems reached much farther than access to text, but that even the wonderful affordances of digital texts were not really all that wonderful for a striving reader.
Making use of websites and other online readings can create some barriers for students. An affordance of online reading is that they are much more visual and much more interesting. In some cases, they might even be dynamic (think of all those dancing ads we now see on newspaper sites or social media pages). Images might bounce, move or change. Additionally, any given page will have multiple hot links. Even a news story, or a wikipedia entry, will have multiple hot links within the paragraphs so that readers can more easily access the definitions and supplemental material. But affordances like these can cause serious breakdowns in comprehension for the reader who is not tracking the main idea of the text. We could call it drift, as in the reader starts the article on one topic, but then within one or two clicks has drifted onto other pages, other topics, leaving behind the original text.
Studies on eye movements show that readers definitely approach digital texts differently from traditional texts, which is good. They are definitely different. However, the struggle is that the tendency of online reading is to bounce or skip versus to read deeply. Online readers are much more likely to zoom up and down long passages of text, looking for subtitles and sipping here and there from the reading. They grow much more impatient, much sooner, since they are accustomed to moving much more quickly in their online reading than they would otherwise read.
With all of this said, it is a good idea to help our students become more familiar with the features of online reading, so that they can develop their skills in this capacity.
Page and Feature Tours. The format and organization of websites have become much more standardized over time. Teaching students how to read a website in the early 2000s was more difficult because as a community we were still experimenting with the medium. But over time, certain features and layouts have become standardized. Helping students to find and notice the following features is a good start: home page, publisher / creator / author of website, date of publication, “About” button / about the author, and “search” button.
Guided Reading Prompts. Give students something to be thinking of as they read the texts. Sometimes, I will have them look for something specific like “According to the website, what are some of the primary reasons for increased vaping among teenagers in the last two years?” However, I might also use the 5 Ws. “In your notebooks, write out the five Ws: who, what, why, where, when. Develop and answer a question for each based on the information provided in the website.”
Discussing Style and Structure. Common Core really pushed Language Arts teachers to think beyond the text. We were forced to move past the “what does the text mean” and “what was the author trying to say” to “how is the author trying to say it?” We should be asking our students to make observations about these online texts. How are they organized? Are there noticeable differences between them and the versions we might find in books and newspapers? What are advantages and disadvantages the author has when they publish it online versus in a book or a newspaper? Has the author or publisher made full use of the digital tools given the topic they are discussing?
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