EFL Students’ Personalized Reading Experiences and its Influence on Engagement and Online Presences

Abstract

These days, screen reading has been widely adopted and discussed by school teachers and researchers. However, few studies have been conducted to formally evaluate the effectiveness of screen reading in improving EFL students’ English reading comprehension, not to mention investigating the factors affecting their reading comprehension outcomes. In this study, a personalized electronic reading approach was proposed for an EFL reading comprehension course; moreover, a learning analytics approach was used to analyze factors affecting the students’ personalized reading comprehension outcomes. A 14-week research design was implemented with the online personalized reading approach using Microsoft Teams as the platform for facilitating and recording peer-to-peer interactions during the screen reading process. In addition, the STUDENTS’ perceptions were surveyed at the end of the 14 weeks. The results show that the experimental group was more engaged and motivated with the use of a personalized e-book reading program and that the group with personalized feedback showed more interaction according to learning analytics data which was collected through the LMS.