SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: English Language & Literature

CONTRIBUTORS:

Umeh, I. A;
Ekpunobi, D;

ABSTRACT:

This work is focused on analysis of internet utilization and its influence on undergraduate students’ reading habits and reading comprehension. The target population for this study was fourth year undergraduate students of two universities in Anambra State namely: Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka and Anambra State University Uli. These were representatives of urban and rural locations respectively. Two hundred male and female respondents were randomly selected from the population. A well-structured questionnaire was administered to elicit vital information from the respondents. Also, a reading comprehension test made up of a comprehension passage and questions were administered to the respondents to buttress the findings from the questionnaire. Ten research questions and seven hypotheses were raised to guide the study. Research questions were answered with simple percentages and arithmetic mean while hypothesis were tested with chi-square, t-test and Analysis of variance (ANOVA). The study revealed that internet utilization is high in the urban and rural areas, the percentage response for high internet users in the urban area is 83% while 17% is for low users. In the rural area, the percentage response for high internet users is 74% while 28% is for low users. The study also revealed that internet utilization is also high among male and female undergraduate students. The percentage response for male undergraduate students that use internet to a high extent is 82% while 18% is for low users. Among the females the percentage response for high users is 73% while 27% is for low users. The study also revealed that the three major purposes of using internet were communication, information and social networking. Marked gender differences in the purpose of using the internet was also found. While 92.5% males use internet for sports update, 7.5% females use it for that purpose. 91.9% and 96.2% females use internet for fashion updates and shopping whereas 8.1% and 3.8% males use the internet for these purposes. The study also revealed that the most prevalent positive influence of the internet on the reading habits of the respondents is reading to locate information 98% while the most prevalent negative influence of the internet on reading habits is online social activities 97%. The study further revealed that high internet users performed better and scored higher in the reading comprehension test than low users. This is shown by the t. cal value of 2.40 which is greater than the calculated critical t. value of 1.96. The P. value .017 is also less than 0.05. Therefore, there is a significant difference between high and low internet users in the scores of reading comprehension test. Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations among others were made: students should take the advantage of the ability to use information from the internet for their reading and learning activities. Although, students use the internet extensively, they need to balance the nature of their use of the Internet between social and academic uses. By learning to use the academic-related resources from the internet, students will be able to complement the information found with the resources from their school learning. This will enable them to be self-directed, self paced and lifelong readers.