Abstract
This paper considers a focus on the challenges facing postgraduate readers in becoming digitally strategy literate to determine the necessary solutions to any reading difficulties they encounter to comprehend digital academic texts. Understanding the factors that demotivate readers to read on-screen would help researchers, educators and teachers to find suitable pedagogical solutions to enhance readers' on-screen academic reading comprehension. Think-aloud protocols followed by stimulated recalls with researcher's field notes were conducted with international postgraduate students studying in a UK educational context. Readers' reading challenges and the ways in which they overcame them were analysed qualitatively and quantitively. The findings demonstrate the various challenges affecting L2 readers when reading academic text on-screen. Readers experience various sorts of challenges during on-screen L2 academic reading, namely comprehensive, physical, language and behavioural challenges. These challenges are a result of lack of digital literacy competences and capabilities, lack of familiarity with on-screen academic reading strategies, experiencing physical issues, having insufficient L2 language proficiency and interacting with unfamiliar text content. Most readers were not aware of backup tools that could be used to assist with several reading comprehension problems, such as speeding up their reading, annotating or having a sense of interacting with texts while reading digitally. Thus, the study suggests competences and capabilities that are necessary to solve digital reading comprehension problems.