Teaching digital literacy to enhance reading comprehension for EFL students

Abstract

Digital literacy has become an essential tool for authentic communication, information accessibility, and reading development. To enhance reading comprehension among English as a foreign language (EFL) students, an effective reading instruction that integrated technology into language teaching should incorporate digital literacy. This mixed-method study aimed to examine how digital literacy enhanced EFL students' reading comprehension and what focus areas of the digital literacy they employed within and beyond the classroom. Thirty Thai high school students from the convenience sampling method participated in this digital literacy instruction for ten weeks. The quantitative data findings from the Wilcoxon signed-rank test on the reading comprehension test revealed that the digital literacy enhanced EFL students' reading comprehension, particularly reading and evaluating information from texts. Moreover, the quantitative and qualitative data from the questionnaire and semi-structure interviews revealed that EFL students tended to access and process information through the focus area of communicating and information in digital literacy for better comprehension beyond the classroom.