Edinburgh Napier University

  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.