STRATEGIES FOR READING HYPERTEXT BY JAPANESE ESL LEARNERS

In the age of the Internet, more and more practitioners design reading activities using the World Wide Web as a means of introducing learning materials in their second language instruction. Researchers emphasize the effectiveness of Web-based reading, especially accessing authentic language materials through the activities, but those studies rarely look into the actual behaviors individual learners engage when they read Web pages. Considering these situations in the research field of reading instructions in ESL classrooms, the research in this paper tries to investigate what kinds of strategies ESL learners use when they read through the authentic Web pages on the Internet. By empirically probing into the strategy use for reading hypertext, this research will provide more objective and reliable data to support better instruction of reading in the second language with hypertext as its material. The key words of this research are intertextual reading, development of cognitively flexible approaches to reading hypertext and control of the cognitive load from reading hypertext in the second language.