Strategies of Reading Digital Texts for Performing Educational Reading Tasks: Study Based on the Think-Aloud Protocols

Abstract

For success in education and life in our informationally saturated digital society, one must be able to select and interpret digital texts of different genres, choose optimal ways of interacting with these texts, and extract and assess information from them. Contemporary education specialists believe that skills of working with digital texts are an integral part of reading literacy; their publications model successful results of interacting with digital texts. Nevertheless, the means of attaining these results remains a very important and topical question for the education system. What strategies allow one to interact with digital texts effectively? How should one teach these strategies to contemporary schoolchildren? The present article aims to identify and classify metacognitive strategies used by competent Russian-speaking lower secondary students for performing learning assignments based on digital texts. It is based on the analysis of think-aloud protocols and data from the online monitoring of readers’ activities on the screen. The study describes and analyzes seven groups of digital reading strategies. The results contribute to basic knowledge about the processes at the root of effective digital reading and hence of the development of approaches to teaching and assessing reading literacy in the digital age.