Hypertext versus Footnotes: High School English Learners’ Online Reading Recall

This study considers forty adolescent English Language Learners who read a passage online containing additional information available through either hypertext links or footnotes. Participants were attending a special high school for English learners at the time of the study. Two versions of the text were offered, one with hypertext and the other with footnotes, and participants were randomly assigned to the footnote or hypertext condition. Answers to multiple choice questions showed no significant difference between groups in recall of the reading under the two conditions, in contrast with an earlier study of learners in higher education settings whose recall of reading with hypertext was significantly lower than with footnotes. Learners’ ratings of perceived comprehensibility of the 2 texts was also not significantly different. Additional interpretive data came from focus group interviews involving all of the participants

Native and Emergent Bilingual University-level English Speakers Reading Online: The Influence of Hypertext on Comprehension

Our study contributes to our understanding of Internet reading by Emergent Bilinguals (EB) and Native English speakers (NS) by investigating their recall of two Internet reading passages containing additional information available through either hypertext links or footnotes. Participants included 25 EB and 25 NS college students. Answers to cued recall questions were scored on the basis of the number of correctly recalled propositions (Kintsch, 1998). Additional interpretive data came from semi-structured interviews with four NS and four EB participants. Quantitative results showed that both groups of students recalled significantly more propositions with linear text than with hypertext. However, although descriptive statistics indicated that NS recalled more than EB, this difference did not reach significance. Interview and survey data confirmed that both NS and EB found the footnoted text easier to recall than the version containing hypertext. Interview themes included the impact of unfamiliar vocabulary and contrasting motives for accessing the links