THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PERCEPTIONS ON THE USE OF ONLINE DIGITAL INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY

Abstract

The use of online interactive media in English teaching and learning has been significantly increasing since past few years. The media got more popular after distant or online learning was encouraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The emergence of digital learning management systems such as Edmodo, Google Classroom, and Moddle further intensified the implementation of not only education-based platforms such as British Council and Quizziz, but also popularized non-education media such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter which were intentionally designed for entertainment. This research is designed to foster students’ perceptions on the use of online digital interactive media and correlate the perceptions with their reading comprehension ability. A total of 41 students from different middle and high schools, who lived in various orphanages, participated in this research. Close-ended Likert-scale questionnaire was distributed to obtain the data of students’ perceptions while reading comprehension test was adapted from British Council and implemented to see the correlation between the students’ perception and their reading comprehension ability. The finding shows that more than 75% of the students believed that online digital interactive media were very crucial and helpful in language learning process. Moreover, the mean score of the reading comprehension test indicated positive correlation between students’ perceptions and their reading comprehension ability. This study implies foster students’ perceptions in the use of online interactive media highly correlate with their reading comprehension performance.