A rapid increase in the use of web-based technologies – and corresponding changes in government and local council policies – in recent years, means that many vital services are now provided solely online. While this has many potential benefits, it can place additional burdens on certain demographic groups, some of whom may become considerably disadvantaged or even disenfranchised. This is particularly problematic for English-as-a Second Language (ESL) speakers, who are often immigrants or refugees and thus have a greater need to access these e-government services, and who may struggle to understand and assess the relevance of complex documents. In this work we investigate the search behaviours and performance of native English speakers and two different groups of ESL speakers when completing e-government tasks, and the effect of document readability/complexity. In contrast with previous work, our results show significant differences between groups of varying language proficiency in terms of objective search performance, time on task, and self-perceived performance and confidence. We also demonstrate that document reading level moderates the effect of language proficiency on objective search performance. The findings contribute to our existing understanding of how English language proficiency affects search for e-government topics, and have important implications for the future development of e-government services to ensure more equitable access and use.

Interacting with information in an on-line capacity is common place for the majority of people nowadays. However, there still remains a considerable section of society whose skills, knowledge and experience in such activities are creating significant barriers to essential services. This research aims to investigate the information interaction behaviours of English as a second language users of on-line governmental services in the UK. Work has already begun on identifying what this user group understands by the term governmental service and the skills and information needs necessary to interact with such services on-line. Findings from the study of searching in a second language (English) in contextually relevant search situations show that despite performing to the best of their abilities, deeming that they were bookmarking documents of relevance to the task and that the tasks were easy, the participants were only choosing documents that were partially or tangentially relevant. This shows that despite their confidence in their overall performance these users were not able to correctly determine their actual performance and would suggest there is scope for search systems to support the information interaction of said users.

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.