Students' Perceptions toward Utilizing Technology to Help Reading Skills: A Case Study of IFL Students in One Public University in Battambang

ABSTRACT


INTRODUCTION
Education is surrounded by technology: every fifth child in American public schools today has access to at least one computer.Every year, they invest about $3 billion in digital content.The United States government is leading a tremendous effort to provide even the most remote and rural schools with affordable high-speed Internet and free online teaching resources (Herold, 2016).Raja (2018) stated that modern students choose to utilize technology and how it impacts their learning, students' learning and interactivity increase when they employ contemporary tools and equipment.The internet has flooded everywhere in education via teaching and learning with digital technologies, and it has significantly impacted many aspects of students' lives, including their reading habits.They see the internet as the primary source of information for completing their assignments, homework, and activities.Technology has integrated critical components of language acquisition at all levels of education to improve the quality of teaching and learning processes and increase student autonomy (Erya & Pustika, 2021).

ISSN: 2964-285X
Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 104 -114 Cambodia has experienced serious political and economic instability in recent years, causing significant hardship for its citizens.To interact and conduct business with individuals, groups, and businesses from other countries, the Cambodian government and people have chosen to use English as their second language to overcome their tragic past (Igawa, 2008).English was not used under the Brutal Period of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but it did exist briefly during the Cambodian Republic Regime (1970Regime ( -1975)), and English resurfaced in Cambodia with the entrance of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in 1993.This enables an increase in the number of English speakers across the country, particularly in places where UNTAC was located (Narith, 2008).According to Neau (2003), The Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport has been incorporating English into the educational system since grade 4.Even though English has been taught in schools for a long time, some teachers still struggle to effectively teach their students, particularly those living in the rural.According to Kline (1985), technology is used intentionally as an insult, to indicate critical operational operations, and to represent progress.We must use hardware, sociological systems of production, and technical systems of use.We might not exist as a species without technology and society, and even if we did, we would be quite impotent.Dias (1999) stated that teachers are assaulted with the idea that computers should be integrated into their classroom activities.Many teachers use computers to provide novel learning possibilities for their students.Some teachers are receiving training on computer hardware and software.According to Davis (1968), reading talents include answering questions, determining word meaning, drawing inferences, recognizing the author's style, and interpreting the mood of the chapter.Research by Block and Israel (2005) supports the idea of predicting a technique to boost reading comprehension and help students create reading goals.Some studies demonstrated that better readers use their educational experience to forecast and generate ideas while reading.
Reading talent is an ability that allows people to interact with written content.According to Rashid & Elahi (2012), the use of technology in distance learning will evolve as it continues to adapt.The curriculum will heavily integrate multimedia and three-dimensional modeling, which will play a significant role in enhancing the responsibilities of the instructor and student.According to Kalangi et al. (2019), students believe that utilizing the Internet is an important element of enhancing their reading abilities, hence it is presumed that they have a positive attitude toward using information and technological communication or reading comprehension in the Internet context.Students frequently use the internet to obtain appropriate reading materials for their reading skill assignments, but education demands direction.Furthermore, teachers must motivate and promote their pupils' English reading abilities, as well as help them develop reading confidence without fear of being humiliated or laughed at by their peers.Lancaster and Lundberg (2019) have proposed using student-identified learning gain indicators to investigate the relationships between student learning gain and instructor conduct.Adult learners must be self-motivated to apply technology in real situations.
Previous studies were conducted in different aspects and were studied by researchers, such as Erya & Pustika (2021), and Wyk and Louw (2008).Caldrone (1995) showed the variety of advantages of using technology in learning to increase a learner's reading skills, spelling, comprehension, vocabulary, and learner's confidence.Moreover, according to Blackwell (2013) having a degree related to technology helps students gain more access to computers compared to a high school diploma.Consequently, using technology in university gives benefits to students in terms of learning skills.With improved reading abilities, students will advance and develop more in all other places of learning (Ismail et al., 2017).Carbonell Carrera et al. (2017) suggests that the new technology in 3D landscape representation allows users to develop map reading skills in the 3D environment and also use abstract visual information.Thus, Research by Ahmad and Khoo (2019) supports that Reading is a complex behavior and children with weak memory need to be assisted with digital literacy skills.Kim (2020) although English has been in Cambodia for a very long time, learning and teaching are still a major problem for teachers and students with English as their second language; and students who live in the countryside.Underachievers could benefit more from using interactive multimedia tools to help them develop their future reading skills.
Therefore, there is no study on the perception of using technology to help students' reading skills in this IFL students in Battambang area written by Cambodian authors yet.Yet, we found some research as mentioned above which did not focus on reading skills and was conducted by international authors in other contexts as well.This conduct is significant because it can help Cambodian students, especially IFL students who are poor in English reading skills to implement technology in any way for their reading skills better.Thus, this provides IFL students with the positive concepts of improving their reading skills by applying technology in their academic study due to reading is the primary language used that help individuals, groups, and commercial communications in Cambodia.So, when students have better reading skills, they will have better communication as well.Also, the findings of this study are critical for assisting IFL students in properly employing technology to improve their reading skills.Through these gaps, this research aimed to explore students' perceptions toward utilizing technology to assist their Reading skills, and another factor that ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 104 -114 encourages students to use technology to help their reading skills were applied.This research aimed to answer the questions as follows: 1) What are the student's perceptions toward utilizing technology to help Reading skills?
2) What are the factors that encourage students to use technology to help their Reading skills?

METHOD
This study employed a combination of methodologies (quantitative and qualitative research).The quantitative method was used to evaluate students' ability to use technology to advance their reading skills, the quantitative method is employed.The purpose of the qualitative study was to gather participant experiences and opinions regarding their technological strengths and weaknesses.Questionnaires were used to collect data about objectives.First, pupils' perceptions of using technology to enhance their reading skills.Second, consider the elements that motivate pupils to use technology to improve their reading skills.Finally, pupils proposed using technology to improve reading skills (Alweer, F, 2002).
The data were collected from both questionnaires and interview questions as the data collection tools.When obtaining data, questionnaires offer an objective way to assess people's knowledge, opinions, attitudes, and behavior (Boynton, 2004).In this study, the Likert Scale also adds to this study.We can compute opinions, attitudes, or a person's impression using the Likert scale (Anggraini, 2021).Several elements on the original Likert scale are specific to the real or hypothetical incident under study.Participants are asked to rate their agreement or disagreement with the given statement or items on a metric scale.Taken as a whole, each comment exposes a facet of the viewpoint on the subject, making them inextricably linked.There are four rating scales Likert Scales used for this research.There are four options: A = 'Strongly Agree', B = 'Agree', C = 'Strongly Disagree', and D = 'Disagree'.These questionnaires are provided in Google form.This study also includes Snowball sampling which with networking and recommendation as its cornerstones, snowball sampling is one of the most often used methods of sampling in qualitative research according to Parker et al., (2019).
In this study, there were a total of 163 students participated in this study.Moreover, there were 3 groups (year 2, year 3, and year 4) of English literature at the National University of Battambang.Faber and Fonseca (2014) stated that to ensure that the results of the investigations remain authentic, samples shouldn't be extremely big, or small.Slovin's formula is used to calculate the sample size as follows: 163 1 + 163(0.04) 2 = 128 n = sampling size N = population size e = the acceptable sampling error (4%) The 128 students were selected from the whole population using the Convenient Sampling method.
Stratified Sampling was used to organize the group of students.The following table shows the number of participants in this study.1 shows that there are 62 or 48.7% which is the highest group among the other two groups of participants, sophomores (2 nd -year students) who attended this study.The second group of participants is junior students (3rd-year students) with 52 or 40% of participants also participating in this study.The last group is senior students (4 th -year students) who joined this research with only 14 of 11.3%.In short, the population of this study is 128 students who joined this study as participants.

What are the student's perceptions toward utilizing technology to help Reading skills?
The first research finding in this study was significant showing common perceptions of using technology to improve reading skills by IFL students.In this study, Cronbach's Alpha was also used to test the reliability ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 104 -114 of the study and to ensure that the questionnaires of the research were reliable.According to Brown (1997) stated that Cronbach alpha is a versatile instrument that assesses the reliability of exam outcomes.The result from Cronbach's alpha score reveals a score of 0.897 which is a good result and shows that the reliability of this study is trustable.As stated in the objectives, this study was aimed to explore the students' perception, study the factors that made them use technology, and student's suggestions to use technology to help their reading skills.The following table below presents the perception of IFL students in applying technology to enhance their reading skills.As stated in Table 4, we noticed that the mean of the first statement was 2.11.It meant that most of the students agreed that they like reading books on their phone / Computer when they feel bored.The mean of the second statement was 2.27, showing that they agreed to a statement that they like to read books, newspapers, and novels on phones, computers, and iPads.In statement number 3 the mean was 2.24.So, it meant that they agreed to what statement said they enjoy learning reading when using technology.Moreover, statement number 4 showed that they often use their technology for their research project which had a mean of 1.40.Which meant they strongly agreed with the statement.Statement number 5 reveals that most of the students agree that using technology in learning reading helps them communicate with their teachers and classmates easily with them mean of 1.84.Statement number 6 had a mean of 1.88 which reveals that students agreed that using technology makes my reading process easier.Furthermore, the mean of 1.74 students strongly agreed with statement number 7 about using technology to learn reading skills to help them improve their pronunciation.With the mean of 2.11 students agreed on statement number 8.They felt more confident when they learned reading online than when they used it in real life.With the mean of 1.91 and 2.24, Students agreed on both statements.They used phones/computers as tools to read books, articles, and novels online in statement number 9 and Their family supported them in using technology to help their reading skills in statement number 10.In short, we can see that the majority of students like reading books with their phone or computer when they feel bored.Moreover, with the help of technology, can help students improve their pronunciation, make their reading process easier, and make them feel more confident while reading books on their phone or computer.
Thus, the following table illustrates more answers to the first research question on students' perception of utilizing technology to help them with reading skills.Table 5, as could be seen the mean of statement number 11 was 2.15 which showed the learner had a positive opinion on the statement.Statement number 12 had 2.30 which showed that learner agreed to the statement of using technology to help their reading skill because they saw their teacher used it.The mean of statement 13 was 2.00 which meant students had a positive opinion.However, with the mean 1.99 and 2.20 of statement 14 and statement 15 it clearly showed that participants were agree that they had a hard time and faced many problems while using technology for the first time.Furthermore, learners also agree with statement number 16 which they faced technical problems when using technology for learning.Also, the mean on statement number 17 revealed that a bad internet connection makes their reading progress.According to statement number 18, it showed a positive perception of reading articles or books with their phone or computer.Based on statement number 19 the mean with 1.98. it meant that most of the students agreed with the idea that "spending more time on reading while using technology helps me develop my reading skill better".The mean in statement number 20 revealed that most students agree with the idea of learning new vocabulary while reading books, newspapers, and novels.Moreover, the mean in statement 21 showed an agreed idea that they can practice reading with their friend through their phone on the online platform.Due to statement 22 revealed that students agree with the statement that "Reading from my phone is a lot better than from books, newspapers, novels."With a mean of 2.49.
As stated in statement 23, it could be concluded that most of the students had strong positive opinions of the statement.In addition, students' strong agreement with the idea of using technology increases my creativity with statement 24 which had a mean of 1.73.Based on statement 25, most of the students agree with the idea that teachers are very important in motivating students to use technology to improve their reading skills.As we could see the mean was 1.78.Also, in statement 26 we could see that the mean was 1.84 which most students think the school should have courses that focus on using technology in learning.Statement 27 showed that students have a positive opinion of the idea of "I think students should use technology more often so that they can get used to it".The mean was 1.90.And the last statement number 28 we could see that students agreed to recommend to others to use technology to help develop their reading skills.As the mean was 1.91.It could be concluded that students have positive opinions of using technology to help their reading skills, to learn new vocabulary, to be creative students, to use for research purposes, to improve pronunciation, and to use technology for their study purposes.

What are the factors that encourage students to use technology to help their Reading skills?
Furthermore, table 6 displays the factors that encourage IFL students to use technology to help their reading skills.Based on Table 6, we can see that statement number 1 showed that students agreed with the statement with a mean of 2.13.Another statement with a mean of 2.02 revealed that students had a positive opinion of the statement "My teachers show me how important technology is for reading skills".Statement number 3 Showed the agreement to the statement with a mean of 2.11.As stated in statement number 4 showed a mean of 2.05.So, it meant students agreed to the idea that teachers motivate them to use technology to improve their reading skills.Also in statement number 5, we could see that the mean was 2.32 which we could conclude that students had an agreement idea on this statement.In Statement 6 we see that the participants agree to the idea that "My family never guided me how to use technology when I was young" with a mean of 2.09.In statement number 7, it gives a clear detail that the mean was 1.96 which meant students agree to the statement that "The courses at my university include technology to find resources".Statement number 8 proved that participants could support their finances by themselves which showed the mean was 2.29.According to the statement number 9, most of the students agree with the statement with a mean of 1.84.As could be seen in statement number 10, which had a mean of 1.77 agreed to the idea of using technology to help improve their other skill.To sum up, the result of the quantitative method showed that most students have a positive opinion of using technology to help their reading skills: such as using technology to read, to learn new vocabulary, to be creative, and to use technology for study purposes.It also showed the factors that help students use technology including teachers, family, and themselves as well.

Discussion
The first research question on students' perception toward using technology to help reading skills was that most students used their phones, computers, iPads, and others just said they like to use technology when they read.Reading books, articles, and novels were popularly made online by IFL students.Thus, family and teachers also supported them in using technology to build up their reading skills.Students agreed that using technology can help them find books online to read when they feel bored, learn new vocabulary, improve their pronunciation, understand more about technology, save their time, and improve their reading comprehension.Students also had a positive perception of using technology to help their reading skills.This can be assumed that technology plays an important role in improving students' reading skills as well as reading habits.Hence, it makes the students feel easier to find sources for reading, and they can enjoy their reading wherever they need or prefer.This result was in line with Erya & Pustika (2021) who showed that reading skills are a very important skill in foreign languages because most E-books and magazines were written in English.Reading ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 104 -114 can be used to develop the reading ability to read other reading material such as online books, online comic books, and novels or magazines online.The result is also in line with Wyk and Louw (2008) found that the reading speed of the reader was increasing without exception.When it comes to helping young learners with their reading difficulties, reading programs work rather quickly and effectively.Since reading gives students the chance to learn, it makes sense to provide students the chance to become better readers.The study by Caldrone (1995) showed that students enjoy using technology to help their reading process and they were very excited about using new interactive descriptions to support their pronunciation, vocabulary, and reading comprehension as well.Their attitude toward reading had turned positive and enthusiastic.
Therefore, this also revealed that the perception of students in using technology to improve their reading comprehension better was commonly positive.Most students have positive viewpoints of using technology to help read, learn new vocabulary, creatively, and for study purposes.Consequently, students can practice their reading with their friends and teachers with their phones, and compute on online platforms.This result was in line with a study by Lai et al. (2012) that examined factors that affect students' adoption of technology for learning, facilitating, identified education compatibility, and attitude toward technology of students.(Park & Kim, 2017) did a study and showed that all the classroom teachers appreciated the positive view from parents.Because they saw the value of using technology to help their children's reading skills in their classes' activities and productively.
The findings showed that the factors that encourage students to implement technology to help their reading skills were mostly students themselves because technology can help adapt their reading skills faster, and even improve other skills while using technology to read online.Other factors showed that the teachers, parents, and family are also the common factors in supporting them to utilize technology to read by showing the importance of it, teaching how to use it, and how to get sources for reading.Furthermore, university courses are also an important issue in encouraging students to use technology for searching sources for reading.So, it can be supposed that the school should have courses that focus on using technology for learning purposes.This result is in line with Biancarosa & Griffiths (2012) recommendation that the educational system should insist on ereading technology that combines learning.In this study, most of the students suggest that government should utilize technology in college so that students are familiar with it.This outcome is also in line with Caldrone (1995) suggests that the use of technology to teach reading can be an incredible experience.Students' enthusiasm for using the applications will motivate them to study more.The researcher also believed that employing reading programs as a tool may be an educational goal to stimulate, improve, and increase student learning.
Students had a positive perception of using technology to help their reading skills.Students agreed that using technology can help them find books online to read when they feel bored, learn new vocabulary, improve their pronunciation, understand more about technology, save their time, and improve their reading comprehension.Furthermore, Family and teachers are also crucial factors that motivate students to use technology to help their reading skills.technology is really important in learning programs including improving learners reading skills.This finding is similar to Kalangi et al. (2019) found that students believe that employing the Internet is an important element of enhancing their reading abilities as well and it is supposed that they have a positive attitude toward using information and technological communication or reading comprehension in the Internet context.This is closely related to Manalu (2019) who presented students had positive reading digital text because it motivated, interested, and suited them to expected reading ways.This can be concluded that when learners use technology in reading, they get benefits from technology such as: learning new words, and new vocabulary, improving pronunciation, and expanding their experience with technology for further usage.

CONCLUSION
There are several points to be accomplished in categorizations: first, it was presented that students had positive perceptions toward utilizing technology to help their Reading skills.Using technology can help learners' reading skills with pronunciation, vocabulary, and communication with friends and teachers.Also, it helped to improve their reading comprehension through reading online, and new creativities.Second, the researchers found some factors that encouraged students to use technology in assisting their reading skills such as parents, teachers, and family.Thus, it can be seen that students themselves were the most important factor in using technology due to it helped them in various ways as adapting reading skills faster, getting reading sources easily -articles, novels, newspapers, and books, and other skills.This means that they used technology to improve their reading comprehension to become better.

Table 1 .
number of participants who participated in this research No.
Table 2 shows the reliability of consistency.

Table 4 .
Student's perception of using technology

Table 6 .
Factors that encourage students to use technology