With the evolutionary change in information and communication technologies (ICT), the definition of literacy has undergone substantial change to include the skills and strategies required to successfully adapt to the rapidly changing ICT contexts. This new definition presents an urgent need to acknowledge the gap between the types of reading experiences students come across at school and those they regularly practice outside the school. One way to bridge such gap is to expand the reading instruction to incorporate electronic reading device, like Kindle, to engage students in electronic reading. Many e-books feature multimodal functionalities, including audio, video, hyperlinks, and interactive tools. Research on this form of reading is still in its infancy in spite of some positive prospects for fostering literacy development and reading comprehension. Therefore, adopting a mixed method approach with 36 college freshmen in central Taiwan, the current study intended to fill in the void by investigating any difference in readers’ reading comprehension and reading motivation, between the Kindle group and the print-based group. The results indicate that embedding aspects of technology into a traditional reading instruction boosted the participants’ motivation to read. Nevertheless, the novelty-driven enthusiasm for electronic reading might not sustain students’ reading motivation long enough to cultivate long-lasting reading habits. The results indicate that there was no significant difference in reading comprehension between two groups. Implications for utilizing electronic readers in EFL classes are also provided.
