Reading Habits Among Students in the Digital Era: Changes of Trends and Behaviours

As it is known, reading habits are very close to all the people around the world. Indeed, the students are the one that always be advised to strengthen their reading habits in order to support their learning capabilities. Walia & Sinha (2014) also emphasizes that reading is considered a practice, a way of thinking and a kind of real experience, and it requires many complex skills, the ability to interpret written words, to skim for knowledge, and then perhaps to read intensively. Therefore, reading habits is considerably significant towards students which can support their academic performances.

In the past, library is the most perfect place for students to spend for their reading activities. They will not be ready to expand reading practices beyond libraries reported by Dali (2015). Thus, academic library plays a very important role in these reading habits despite major changes in trends and behaviours. However, the traditional function of the academic library, which has rightfully been dubbed the "heart" of the academic community, remains intact (Banou et al., 2008). Besides that, students also take the traditional method of readings such as books, magazines and journals where the fact they can feel the turning the pages and enjoy holding the physical materials. Songhui (2008) points out that, by “traditional reading habit” is supposed the reading of books published within the sort of paper only. Hence, the traditional student’s reading habit has slowly changed and transformed in line with the current technological developments.

The revolution of technology plays a role of unpredictable changes and pervasive effect that has transformed the society nowadays. Literally, this situation is referring to the digital era that has completely dominating the world today. Hall (2019) indicates the digital era has brought new technologies, tactics and organizations to support action. Consequently, the digital era has totally brought large and rapid changes occurring in the development of the industry in this world.

As the world becomes technologically advanced, many people nowadays have changed their culture and environment on reading by looking for the digital sources of reading materials. Abdul Karim & Hasan (2007) had earlier reported that the trend may have shifted to a digital reading habit, which is completely different from the traditional definition of reading. Even though the reading habits have literally changed, we need to be disciplined and committed in order to cultivate lifelong reading habits in our society. There have several issues on reading habit problems among students and a key issue is the emergence of various applications and social media has neglected the time of the students. The tremendous advancement in data innovation that consequently have made understudies to peruse books less and get more associated with sitting in front of the television, chatting and getting all the more profoundly fascinated in the activities in the social media (Fatiloro et al., 2017). The other issues are the level of the information literacy skills among the students. According to (Böckle et al. (2020), the literacy rate is heavily influenced by reading ability and access to services such as libraries. It is important for the students not only able to read for information and believe in what they see, they should have the ability to understand the information or messages sending from all of different types and formats of reading sources. Generally, the advancement of digital technology has affected many other spheres of our lives and indirectly hit our reading habits.

It is significant to explore the impact of digital era towards reading habits since it is an important to identify the trends and behaviours among students nowadays. With the availability of various gadgets and widespread use of social media, students are more interested in spending their time reading through the phone or laptop. According to Tanjung et al. (2017), indicate that it's closely associated with the utilization of gadget among students like smart phones or tabs which are simply exploited to access the present online news In this digital age, readers (especially younger readers) tends to grow gradually develop the screen-based reading behaviour. According to Abdul Karim & Hasan (2007) found thatthe developing amount of reading time are spent more on searching and browsing for information on the web based platform. Currently, students choose to stay in one place and access the internet to read while doing another movement not just focus in one place and read lots of documents (Manalu, 2019). Furthermore, it clearly shows that the main reason of the changes of this trends and behaviours on reading habits are related to the ubiquity and advancement of technology. Particularly, this study is performed to explore theimpact of digital era on reading habits and behaviours among students.

To achieve the objectives of this paper, the following hypotheses is formulated. Then, the paper discusses the methodology and follows with the results and findings about the topics. The last section of this paper will discuss and make a conclusion on the topics.

Reading is a complex and cognitive process for learners to easily understand the information that they receive every day. It can be either through text or passages, which usually come from a printed or non-printed material. Besides, Mohamed et al. (2012) found that some view reading as a complex process integrating all aspects of human behaviours and demanding varied and continued instructional guidance to read precisely, to appraise and to relate to others during a significant way. The concept of reading is generally an activity to understand meaning, message from written materials or non-printed that helps the readers catch what idea the writer is trying to convey.