Reading English Text on Screen vs Reading English Text on Printed-Book: A Phenomenological Study

There are many people use their smartphones, tablets and computers to read English text. Theuse of gadget was popular to students to help them to improve their English skills especiallyreading. This study sought the preference of the students on reading which is reading onpapers or reading on screen. The respondent of this study was 1% from total students enrolledfor the short-semester, academic year 2018/2019. Each respondent was the representativefrom 5 majors; 1 from Accounting, 1 from Management, 1 from System Information, 1 fromMathematic Education, and 1 from Information Technology. The respondent was chosen randomly using the ballot system. The semi-structured interviews were utilized with open-ended questions. The semi-structured interview consisted of 10 questions and some followed-up questions to simplify and to make it easy for the students to understand the questions. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed in order to find out the answer of theresearch questions. The result of the study showed that the students prefer reading on screeninstead of paper because it is easy to access and easy to carry everywhere. Three of therespondents was chosen handphone as the easier tool to use when reading English text. Basedon the result, it is recommended for the English teachers to mix the teaching and learningprocess with new technique especially something that work with screen.