A Vast Source of Reading Materials; the Internet

Abstract

Internet has an undeniable place in the daily life of people from all ages. As a requirement of the modern world, it serves many different functions such as chat, research, news, watching videos and etc. However, how about English Language Teaching? I mean, to what extent, can we use the internet as a source of reading materials? Departing from this question, this study focuses on the effective usage and exploitation of the internet as a source of reading materials in the modern communicative reading classes, its perception by English language learners and the effects of this process on students' motivation for reading courses. At the beginning of the research process, students who are at low-intermediate proficiency level were given a questionnaire which aimed to reveal their general attitude towards Reading. Then, they were presented some particular authentic reading materials from the internet such as news, videos, articles and etc which are all related to the chapters in their course book. By using these various web-based materials, they performed some activities for four weeks. At the end of the research process, they were given the same questionnaire that they had already taken at the beginning of the study and results of pre and post questionnaires were compared to find whether there was a change in students' attitudes towards Reading in general. Afterwards, an activity perception questionnaire which reveals their perception of the active and instant usage of the internet as a source of supplementary reading materials were presented to the students to perform and results of attitude and perception questionnaires were compared with each other to reveal if web-based materials are effective on the change of students' attitudes towards Reading. The findings, implications, conclusions and details of the study will be presented.