A pupil who does not learn to comprehend various texts in the early school years has severe difficulties in studying all school subjects. Good readers use their knowledge of text structure to effectively and strategically process the text. If they have difficulties in understanding the text because of insufficient background information, difficulty of words, or unfamiliar text structure, they are able to select appropriate comprehension strategies that provide access to knowledge that is beyond their personal experience. (Barton & Sawyer, 2003; Bimmel & van Schooten, 2004; Dougherty Stahl, 2004; McLaughlin, 2006.) Gradually young readers start reading texts that contain many words that are not part of their oral vocabulary. It is a demanding task for a child to derive the meaning of an unknown word from the written context. Strategies that a reader uses are defined as purposeful and situated (contex-related) sequences of activities. Text-oriented activities occur when a reader’s main goal is to understand the text passage around the unknown word. Word-oriented activities are used when a reader mainly aims to find out the contextual meaning of the unknown word. Vocabulary-knowledge-oriented activities are used when reader’s main goal is to improve his or her word knowledge. (van Daalen-Kapteijns, Elshout-Mohr, & de Glopper, 2001.) Furthermore, pupils should also learn to find information from electronic sources. It is possible that a pupil uses regularly a computer but does not know how to use it effectively as a source of information. Outside school he or she may use it only for playing games. In Finland newspapers are an important part of people’s everyday life. There 87 per cent of the families have subscribed at least one newspaper and 93 per cent of them have Internet connection at home. According to the results of PISA, active reading of newspapers is strongly related to good reading skills. (Linnakylä & Malin, 2007.) Today many people also read newspapers online. However, several adults feel that reading an article from a monitor is more difficult than reading printed text. The first objective of our study was to find out how well pupils in sixth grade comprehend text when reading it in a printed newspaper and online. The second objective was to find out how well sixth graders are able to derive the meaning of an unknown word from written context when reading the text in these two forms.

In the end of their sixth school year 159 pupils (85 boys and 73 girls) took part in the study. These pupils studied in five schools in two Finnish seaside towns. At that time they were 12 or 13 years old. They read two newspaper articles – one in a printed newspaper and one in an electronic newspaper. The articles were similar in regard to their content, length and level of difficulty. The content of both articles were related to shipwrecks (for instance, Vrow Maria) found in the Baltic sea. After reading an article the pupils answered ten questions and explained the meaning of ten words in the article. As examples of the words, could be mentioned ‘refined products’, ‘posterity’, ‘trustful’, and ‘registered’. Some of the words have different meanings in different text contexts.

It was obvious that after six school years several pupils still had great difficulties in comprehending newspaper text. Deriving the meaning of an unknown word from written context was even more demanding a task. The main results showed that the pupils could answer significantly better the questions related to the printed article than the questions related to the article they read online. In addition, they could explain significantly better the words picked from the printed article than from the electronic article. The results indicate that it is important for the pupils to learn to comprehend texts of different genres when reading them as well as in printed as in digital form. It is essential to start to teach versatile reading comprehension strategies as early as possible. Moreover, pupils need to be taught how text context helps to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word.