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Strangers in a Strange Land: A Study of Second Language Speakers Searching for e-Services

Authors:

David Brazier,

Morgan HarveyAuthors Info & Claims

CHIIR '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

Pages 281 - 284

https://doi.org/10.1145/3020165.3022133

Published: 07 March 2017 Publication History

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Abstract

While the recent trend of digitisation of government and related services offers many advantages, it could introduce problems for those who are less information literate or who have particular issues searching for and understanding the necessary content. In this study ten participants, who speak English as a second language, were given four search tasks designed to reflect actual information seeking situations. They completed pre- and post-search questionnaires to identify the relevancy of the task, their English language ability and search experience.

Our results suggest that, despite a perception that they performed to the best of their abilities, were bookmarking relevant documents and that the given tasks were easy, the students were actually often choosing documents that are only partially or tangentially relevant. The repercussions of this discrepancy are clear and suggest that much more assistance is needed before such services can be made 'digital by default'.

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Cited By

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Harvey MBrazier D(2022)E-government information search by English-as-a Second Language speakers: The effects of language proficiency and document reading levelInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2022.10298559:4(102985)Online publication date: Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2022.102985
Brazier DHarvey M(2018)A Comparative Study of Native and Non-native Information Seeking BehavioursAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_18(237-248)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_18
Brazier DNordlie RPharo NFreund LLarsen BRussel D(2017)The Long Term Effects of Search Query Examples on the Search Behaviours of Non-native Users of Government E-ServicesProceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3020165.3022175(417-419)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3020165.3022175
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Index Terms

Strangers in a Strange Land: A Study of Second Language Speakers Searching for e-Services
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. HCI design and evaluation methods
      1. Laboratory experiments
      2. User studies
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Users and interactive retrieval

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Published In

CHIIR '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

March 2017

454 pages

ISBN:9781450346771

DOI:10.1145/3020165

Conference Chairs:
Ragnar Nordlie
Oslo & Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway
,
Nils Pharo
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway
,
Program Chairs:
Luanne Freund
University of British Columbia, Canada
,
Birger Larsen
Aalborg University, Denmark
,
Dan Russel
Google, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 March 2017

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CHIIR '17

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SIGIR

CHIIR '17: Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

March 7 - 11, 2017

Oslo, Norway

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CHIIR '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 48 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 163 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

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Harvey MBrazier D(2022)E-government information search by English-as-a Second Language speakers: The effects of language proficiency and document reading levelInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2022.10298559:4(102985)Online publication date: Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2022.102985
Brazier DHarvey M(2018)A Comparative Study of Native and Non-native Information Seeking BehavioursAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_18(237-248)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_18
Brazier DNordlie RPharo NFreund LLarsen BRussel D(2017)The Long Term Effects of Search Query Examples on the Search Behaviours of Non-native Users of Government E-ServicesProceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3020165.3022175(417-419)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3020165.3022175
Brazier DHarvey M(2017)E-Government and the Digital Divide: A Study of English-as-a-Second-Language Users’ Information BehaviourAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-319-56608-5_21(266-277)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56608-5_21

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Investigating the Effects of Google's Search Engine Result Page in Evaluating the Credibility of Online News Sources

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