Innovation in Language Learning

Online reading is an important component of academic activities conducted by learners nowadays, especially at tertiary level. Therefore, it is essential to understand how learners read, assimilate, manage and construct knowledge from online texts or learn from fellow learners. The present study aims to design an experimental online reading system, which will allow for an organized monitoring of students' reading activities. The proposed system, named iREAD-UKM (Interactive Reading Across Academic Discipline), will model the types of online reading strategies that ease the process of reading academic texts into specifications for a support system to assist learners when they do online reading. The final product will be an online reading system based on the specifications. The proposed system will present an enhanced interaction for online reading in an e-learning environment. The focus of this paper is on how the application of Collaborative Learning theory was employed to integrate the online forum (a learning feature in the system) in order to facilitate and scaffolds the production of collective ways of seeing, acting and knowing, and production of shared knowledge among learners. Data based on interviews with lecturers from the social sciences, sciences and medical faculties at UKM, to find out about the types of online reading materials and tasks that these lectures assigned to their students was also used to decide on the system's specification.