earticle

영어

Globalizing ESL classrooms simply means widening the access to the teaching and learning of the English language so that distance learners, who include local and foreign students, could find and share relevant information and resources easily through the web. According to Howell, William, and Lindsay (2003), on-line learning has become one of the new methods to disseminate information and education. In the era of technology advancement and democratization of education, there is a dire need to understand how best English language is taught via on-line. Hence, issues such as facilitation, motivation, and collaboration need serious considerations in developing any on-line materials (Nor Aziah, 2007). In this paper, reading is given prime importance and serves as the focus of the paper since it is a skill that is most basic in following any education (Pandian, 2006). Hence, readers need to know the reading strategies available and how to effectively use them in order to be able to do the various reading skills required in order to be proficient in reading. It is the aim of this paper to explore relevant theoretical background in the quest to develop academic reading strategies on-line instruction. This paper will scrutinize among others the theories of reading (Cohen, 1990) and adult learners (Knowles, 1990) in order to come up with the design principles. Additionally, three major researches conducted on adult learners’ reading strategies (Faizah, 2004), on-line language learning (Faizah et al, 2007), and scaffolding adult on-line learning (Nor Aziah, 2007) will be referred to in order to assist the identification of the design principles. This paper is expected to inform on- line material designers/developers, curriculum developers, adult learners and trainers. The added value of this paper is that the identified design principles could be made as the main reference as they are generalisable to other English subjects offered on-line besides reading.