Digital Reading and Traditional Reading
Reading is a cognitive multisensory activity. According to Kintsch (1988), reading is an interactive process, in which readers actively interpret the text by integrating their own experiences and thoughts with the knowledge of the text (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). Digital reading is a process of meaning-making from a text in a digital format. It builds on traditional print reading which usually refers to written texts in a linear way. Baron (2015) asserts that digital reading reshapes the sphere of reading, and that digital reading and traditional reading are distinct. Traditional reading requires visual attention and the tactile act of holding a physical book or pages in addition to invisible brain activity. As educational reading materials become increasingly digitalized, the impact of technological interfaces on reading comprehension has been studied. Accessibility, financial effectiveness (Daniel & Woody, 2012), and environmental benefits are the most frequently mentioned advantages of e-reading. Common disadvantages include: e-reading is not preferable for longer texts (Baron et al., 2017), e-reading is poor in holding readers’ concentration (Baron et al., 2017), and e-reading negatively impacts students’ reading comprehension (Mengen et al., 2013; Kong et al., 2018). The above-mentioned findings of e-reading are mostly monomodal, i.e., the written books are simply displayed on a screen.
Today, digital reading goes beyond traditional monomodal reading practices. E-reading is defined as any device that can display text on a screen, which makes a “multimodal interaction” (Norris, 2004) possible between the producer and his readers, and even among readers through a bullet screen. The semiotic process creates two types of representations: a text-based model, in which the reader forms their interpretant based on the sign itself; and a situation model, in which the reader forms their interpretant based on their situation (Kintsch, 2013).