Searching for new pedagogies: Literacy practices and interaction around digital texts
Submitted by:
Liisa Tainio
Abstract:
Today, pupils and students in classroom are often equipped with laptops, iPads, smart phones, or other devices for reading, creating and producing different kinds of digital texts. Even if these digital resources for reading and writing texts are everyday life at schools, and teachers are encouraged to use them in their teaching, knowledge about digital events and practices, processes of reading and writing digital texts, and the consequences for digitalization of literacy practices for learning remains sporadic. We know, for example, that writing with a laptop is more motivating than writing with pen or pencil (Keengwe, Schnellert, & Mills 2012); searching for information in the internet for the purposes of writing is both too easy and too demanding for students (Skaar 2015); students’ reading comprehension is deeper when they read printed texts than when they read digital texts (Mangen, Walgermo & Brønnick 2013); different kinds of tactile activities when writing with pen or with keyboard have different consequences for remembering and understanding the contents (Mangen & Balsvik 2016); students may be tempted to do other than task-oriented activities during the lesson when they have access to internet and social media (Blikstad-Balas 2013).
In this round table researchers of literacy introduce their results on digital literacy practices and reflect the consequences of the results for the purposes of understanding the possibilities and problems of digital literacy practices in classroom interaction and for developing the most effective and motivating literacy pedagogies.
- Christina Olin-Scheller & Marie Nilsberth
Recently, many schools and municipalities in Sweden have invested heavily in digital tools. Students of secondary schools have been provided with their own tablets or laptops − often with the expectation that this will affect the teaching and learning positively. In parallel with these efforts, the classroom − through the students' own smart phones − have become connected from the inside. The aim with this paper is to describe ways in which digitality has affected traditionally paper-based literacy practices in classrooms, and how these new literacy practices can be studied empirically. We describe the flow of different literacy events during selected lessons, from the perspective of New Literacy Studies (Barton, 2007). As a second step, we take a specific focus on one of the resources used, students’ uses of smartphones, and investigates from a media ecologic perspective (Erixon, 2012; Lum, 2006) how use of smart-phones co-occur and compete with other resources such as laptops, books, pen and paper during the lesson. The empirical material consists of 30 hours of recorded classroom interaction. Two cameras have been used, one that focuses on the focus students interactions with peers and teachers and one that documents the students’ uses of laptops. Also the students’ smartphones have been recorded through use of screen sharing. Overall, our study shows that the paper-based resources are placed in the classroom periphery. A preliminary conclusion is that digitalization in one perspective has altered traditional patterns of reading and writing in Swedish upper secondary school.
References:
Barton, D. (2007). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Gee, J.P. (2011)
Erixon, P-O. (2012). Skola och skrivundervisning i ett medieekologiskt perspektiv. In A-C. Edlund (Eds.), Att läsa och skriva: Två vågor av vardagligt skriftbruk i Norden 1800-2000., (pp. 179-195). Umeå: Nordliga studier.
Lum, C. M. K., (ed.) (2006). Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication. The Media Ecology Tradition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc.
- Astrid Roe
The Norwegian national reading test has been paper based since it was introduced in 2004, but in 2016 students completed it on screen for the first time. The framework for the test has not been changed, only the mode. Assuming that mode might influence students’ reading comprehension, the current study is based on the field trial for the national reading test for 8th grade for 2016 at 9 schools providing a sample size of 973 students. Two different test booklets with 7 texts and 45 -47 items were completed on paper and on screen, and each student did one test on either paper or screen. The students were randomly selected from 7 schools to the different tests. The results showed that the change in mode seemed to have an impact on gender difference. Gender differences favoring girls increased on screen, girls performed better and boys performed poorer (Jensen & Roe, forthcoming). These results are in opposition to findings from PISA 2012, when the reading test was transferred from paper to screen, and gender differences did not seem to be influenced by mode (Kjærnsli and Olsen, 2013). It was argued that fixed ‘print’ texts on screen in an assessment situation are no longer a violation of authenticity (OECD 2013:15). We will discuss whether differences between the national reading test and the PISA reading test as they appear on screen may explain the increase in gender difference on screen on the national reading test.
References
Jensen, R. & Roe, A. (forthcoming). You read on screen, I read on paper – are we reading the same text?
Kjærnsli, M. & Olsen, R. V. (2023). Fortsatt en vei å gå. Norske elevers kompetanse i matematikk, natrfag og lesing i PISA 2012. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
OECD (2013). PISA 2015 Draft Reading Literacy Framework. URL: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/Draft%20PISA%202015%20Reading%20Framework%20.pdf 23.05.15.
- Anna Slotte & Liisa Tainio & Riitta Juvonen
Smartphones, and the software they entail, afford various, potentially useful writing resources: e.g. dictionaries and text editors as well as an access to Internet and to virtual interaction. Still, when writing takes place in classrooms, students’ digital practices with their smartphones may not always be congruent with literacy events conducted by the teacher (cf. Blikstad-Balas 2015). This paper examines how smartphones are used as part of the teacher initiated writing tasks that take place in two Finnish upper secondary schools during lessons on e.g. history and mother tongue (Swedish).
Our study draws on socio-cultural approach to writing, and we see writing as part of the ongoing interaction in classroom (e.g. Barton & Papen 2010). The data consist of video-recorded face-to-face interaction during the lessons when students are performing writing tasks with their smartphones. The data comes from a larger corpus of video-recorded interaction collected for the project Textmöten (www.textmoten.com). As a method, we apply multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada & Svinhufvud 2016).
In this paper, we will illustrate when and how smartphones and their resources are employed during the writing tasks. We pay attention to emergent practices and analyze the ways in which the use of smartphones relates to students’ individual and collaborative writing processes with peers in and out of the classroom setting. In our data, smartphones are frequently used in various problem-solving processes during writing but less actively in actual text production. Our results implicate that students need support for integrating digital practices in their writing processes.
Keywords: digital literacy practices, smartphones, upper secondary school
References
Barton, D. & Papen, U. (2010). What is the anthropology of writing? In D. Barton & U. Papen (eds.) Anthropology of writing. Understanding textually mediated worlds (pp. 3-32). London: Continuum.
Blikstad-Balas, M. (2015) Digital Literacy in Upper Secondary School – What Do Students Use Their Laptops for During Teacher Instruction? Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, pp. 122–137.
Mondada, L. & Svinhufvud, K. (2016). Writing-in-interaction: Studying writing as multimodal phenomenon in social interaction. Language and Dialogue 6:1, pp. 1–53.