Abstract

The current study reports a two-year research project funded by the Government of the Republic of Indonesia through a competitive research scheme. The aim is basically to respond to the fact most university students have very low interests in reading activities, such as finding out important information for their term papers as assigned by the lectures. Instead, most of the time is spent in BBM, IPhone chats and Facebooking of non-academic nature (mostly social encounters). This has triggered a team of researchers to find out ways to increase or encourage reading interests. Internet browsing was undertaken to search for possible software application systems which could be used to administer online assessments in reading class. It was Question Writer (QW3.5) selected for use in the current study. It is a paid software application system especially developed for online assessments. It can perform various types of question formats with the students’ responses directly forwarded to the teacher’s email, and feedbacks and scorings automatically performed by the system. In the current study, a discussion group called ‘Reading Maniacs’ was created in Facebook for the students to get access to both reading materials and assessments. Questionnaire and interviews were conducted to investigate how the students got motivated in reading class and if their reading interests got increased. The findings indicate that the students were very motivated to participate in the online assessments supported by Facebook group discussion, thereby their reading interests leveled up. It was therefore recommended that online assessment of reading skills be conducted as additional activities to the well-supervised offline reading examination. Future researchers may want to administer Questionnaire to the reading teachers to get some feedbacks.

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