Reading comprehension in paper and digital based English texts: A comparative study

Reading mediums, which were primitive materials like clay, leather, and papyrus, then paper dominated reading for a long period, now have been evolving into digital screens. While the act of reading constitutes a significant role in our daily lives, how we read what we read is very important, since platforms from which we read, do seem to affect not only our comprehension but also help us raise awareness about our reading preferences specific to a particular medium. Therefore, the first stage of this study is to identify preferences of university students who were treated as participants of the study. Considering that the main purpose of reading can be regarded as comprehension, the primary aim of this research is to investigate whether reading mediums have an impact on reading comprehension. For this, as a first stage, our participants, 170 undergraduate students from the Electrical-Electronics Engineering (EEE) and the English Language Teaching (ELT) departments at Çukurova University in Turkey, were administered a questionnaire inquiring about reading medium preferences and pertaining reasons. As a second stage, they were administered a reading comprehension test through digital screen and printed-paper with an eight-week interval between the two mediums. Participants' preferences and their test performances were analyzed through SPSS 20.0 utilizing descriptive statistics (frequencies and crosstabs) and a paired-samples t-test. The findings of the study indicate that the majority of participants preferred printed-paper over digital screen for their reading activities. While no statistically significant difference was found between preferences of the EEE and the ELT participants, a significant difference, however, was observed in favor of females preferring printed-paper. In terms of reading comprehension, while reading from printed-paper was found to provide higher comprehension performance for overall participants in general and ELT participants, regarding comprehension performance of EEE participants, no statistically significant difference was observed between the two mediums. This study, by its nature, has significant implications for all readers in general, and specifically, for students performing academic work, teachers, school administrators, policy makers, and e-reading designers.