Abstract:
Reading makes a man perfect and it is very essential component to University
students. Hence, students face various obstacles in developing reading habits. Therefore,
with the aim of assessing students’ reading habits and identifying the changes and
the factors infl uenced when they pursue education through online learning tools due
to corona fears, the study was conducted with second year students of Department of
Islamic Studies of South Eastern University of Sri Lanka. For this study, which was
carried out using quantitative research methods, a fi lled questionnaire was obtained as
primary data from 121 of the 174 students studying in the year through Google Forms,
analyzed through MS Excel and the results were described. Secondary data such as
research articles, journals, and web articles related to the topic were also used. At the end
of the study, it was found that students’ reading habit was healthy, the amount of time
they spent on daily reading varied, their reading habits have declined due to continuing
education through online from home and factors such as lack of library, diffi culty in
reading on electronic devices, home works, social media, laziness, workload, sleepiness
and increase in data cost have more infl uence on their reading decline, they have the
habit of reading from both hard and soft sources, most of them use their smartphones to
read the soft copy, while reading through electronic devices they face various problems
such as not being able to read for a long time, headache, numbness like reading a book in
hand, boredom, inability to read small letters, wasting more time and forgetting easily,.
The conclusion of this study was that the continuation of educational activities fromhome had a negative impact on the reading habits of the students for various reasons.
However, the positive change in their reading habits after entering university has been
a motivating force for them to continue reading under any circumstances. At the same
time, where guidance is provided to overcome challenges, they face in developing
reading habits, further positive improvements can be expected in their reading habits.
