This experimental study investigates whether the reading platform, digital or paper, and the texts affect university students’ L2 reading comprehension and information retention. From the literature review, it can be seen that while the impact of the two platforms on reading comprehension has received significant attention in research, the results have been inconsistent due to the involvement of other factors, for instance, while some meta-analysis studies of reading comprehension only considered reading comprehension in the first language (e.g, Clinton, 2019), others did not take into account the language of reading comprehension which is either L1 or L2 (Kong et al., 2018; Peras et al., 2023). Furthermore, the genre, the length of the text, as well as other features connected to digital screens (e.g., the interactive mode, animated visuals) and paper (e.g., 2-D pictures) among different studies could affect the results, especially when the two conditions of digital screens and paper were not comparable. Moreover, there is a lack of studies investigating the relationship between the two platforms and learners’ information retention, especially after a period of time. They are the gaps that this study seeks to cover, including to take into account the text as a variable that can influence learners’ information retention besides the platform (paper versus digital). This study was conducted in students using English as a second language, and their English proficiency was from upper-intermediate to advanced levels. The study did not treat L1 or L2 as a variable because only L2 was used for the experiment. Students’ English levels were treated as a part of learners’ differences that can create individual random effects for the study. With the aforementioned purposes and directions, the research questions of the study are the following:

Research question1: Are there any differences between digital and paper platforms in L2 reading comprehension and information retention?

Research question 2:Is there a correlation between characteristics of the texts and students’ L2 information retention?

Conducted in two phases (April and November 2024) with a total of 46 participants, the study involved reading both literary and informative texts matched for length, difficulty, and readability (assessed via TTR, Maas’s indices, FRE, and Coh-Metrix). Comprehension and retention were evaluated using multiple-choice and cloze tests, and results were analysed using paired samples T-tests and Linear Mixed Models. The instruments were created using the Bloom taxonomy and then validated, applying test-retest to check the reliability and correlation of the results over time.

The study found that platforms and the texts did not significantly impact students’ reading comprehension and information retention, especially when the difficulty of texts (grade levels 8 and 7) is much lower than students’ level (undergraduate students). Instead, the random effects from students played a significant role to explain their results. Notably, students who switched reading platforms showed significant information loss over time with a large effect size, whereas those who maintained the same paper reading did not. However, the small sample size and the local context require caution to interprete the study’s results. Cognitive load theory and neuroscientific findings about handwriting versus typing were used to discuss the study’s findings.

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