DISEÑO DE INTERVENCIÓN:

9. Visit your public library often and take advantage of the resources offered there you can get a library card and borrow books, CDs and DVDs from the library for free.

others attempt to understand how students become adept at reading online to learn and how students acquire the necessary skills, strategies and dispositions required to do so. It includes the skills, strategies, disposition and social practices that take place as students read online information to learn and is based around five practices:

(1) Reading to identify important questions (2) Reading to locate information

(3) Reading to evaluate information critically (4) Reading to synthesize information and

(5) Reading to communicate information within these five practices reside the skills, strategies and dispositions that are distinctive to online reading comprehension as well as to others that are also important for offline reading comprehension.

Today's youths may be spending less time using traditional methods for reading. However, they are still reading as they utilize the wide varieties of new technologies especially the internet for communication, friendship, play and self-expression. The internet is of great importance in the lives of the youth even though they are in direct competition with traditional activities such as reading, (Johnson, 18), young people especially undergraduates have a great desire to own an ipod, cell phone, various gaming systems and other technology gadgets (Thomson and Laing 491). Instead of hanging out at local parks, youths choose to hang out online (Ito et al; 164).

However, in order to frame a basic concept of New Literacies for the purpose of this study, the following definition is used:

The new literacies of the Internet include the skills, strategies, and dispositions necessary to successfully use and adapt to the rapidly changing information and communication technologies and contexts that continuously emerge in our world and influence all areas of our personal and professional lives. These new literacies allow us to use the Internet

to identify important questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of that information, synthesize information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others, (Banks and Banks, 1572).

It is important to understand that these literacies and technologies do not replace the time honored notion of literacy as the rudimentary ability to decode, comprehend and produce written language. They instead accommodate the availability of new tools and forms through which youths communicate. They also give us insights into the interaction of today's youth with technology.

New literacies theory is defined by two distinct levels; uppercase (New Literacies) and lowercase (new literacies). Uppercase New Literacies serves as an encompassing broader theoretical framework defined by literacy skills, both new and traditional, used by today's youth as they interact with technologies such as video games, social networks, web browsing and cell phones (Lamke, 45; Leu, 310). As such, New literacies view the internet in the context of a communication tool. It assumes a view that the internet provides a variety of opportunities for interaction within a diverse set of communication tools. It is assumed that all these tools and interactions involve a level of literacy knowledge in order to acquire, store and make meaning of information, (Leu, 310).

In contrast, lowercase new literacies explore focused concepts of new literacy such as text meaning within twitter communication (Granhow and Gleason, 464) or a focused disciplinary based such as semiotics of multimodality in online media. As such, these more focused concepts of new literacy help shape and define the larger theory of new literacies according to Kress (36).

The Uses and Gratification Theory:

This is a communication theory. It is positivistic in its approach, based in the socio-psychological communication tradition and focuses on communication at the mass media scale.

This theory propounded by Elihu Katz in 1970 is concerned with h6w people use media for gratification of their needs. An outcome of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. It propounds the fact that people choose what they want to see or read and the different media compete to satisfy each individuals‟ needs. As commonly understood by gratification researchers, the term

"audience activity" postulate a voluntaristic and selective orientation by audiences towards the communication process (La Rose, Mastro and Elastin (395). In brief, it suggests that media use is motivated by needs and goals that are defined by audience members themselves and active participation in the communication process may facilitate, limit or otherwise influence the gratification and effects associated with exposure. Current thinking also suggest that audience activity is best conceptualized as a variable construct, with audience exhibiting varying kinds and degrees of activity.

Unlike other theories concerning media consumption, uses and gratification theory gives the consumer power to discern what media they consume, with the assumption that the consumer has a clear intent and use. This contradicts previous theories such as Mass Society Theory that states that people are helpless victims of mass media produced by large companies and Individual Differences Perspective, which states that intelligence and self-esteem largely drive an individual's mass media choice.

Given these differing theories uses and gratification theory is unique in its assumptions that:

- The audience is active and its media use is goal oriented.

- The initiative in linking need gratification to specific medium choice rests with the audience member.

- The media compete with other resources for need satisfaction.

People have enough self-awareness of their media use, interests and motives to be able to provide researchers with an accurate picture of that use.

Value judgment of media content can only be assessed by the audience.

Katz and Blumler (509) studied people's use of the mass media to meet specific needs and presented a five- fold classification of needs, which they say all media users essentially have. These are:

1. Cognitive needs: needs related to strengthening of information, knowledge, and understanding of our environment.

2. Affective needs: needs related to strengthening aesthetic, pleasurable and emotional experiences

3. Personal integrative needs: needs related to strengthening credibility confidence, stability and status of individuals.

4. Social integrative needs: needs related to strengthening contact with family, friends and the world.

5. Escapist needs: needs related to escape, release tension and the desire for diversion.

Thus, the objectives of the Uses & Gratification theory are: firstly to explain the psychological needs that shape why people use the internet and what motivates them to engage in certain internet use behaviours for gratification (Rubin 141). Secondly, it is to explain how individual use mass communication to gratify their needs and last but not the least, it is to identify the positive and negative influence of individual internet use. This study utilizes the concepts of New Literacies theory as well as uses and gratification theory to better understand the influence of the internet on the reading habits and reading comprehension of undergraduate students. Thus, the new literacies theory and uses and

gratification theory provided unique frameworks upon which the data in this study may be viewed, analyzed and discussed .