Resources and strategies in adolescents’ meaning making processes of argumentative digital texts
Submitted by:
Marie Wejrum
Abstract:
Students’ online reading comprehension is a challenging issue for L1 as visual and auditory elements in texts are increasingly important in a changing global textual landscape, where students are constantly exposed to various influence mechanisms.
Drawing on social semiotics (Hodge & Kress 1988) the purpose is to gain new knowledge of adolescent students’ ability to interpret and synthesize meaning from different modalities in argumentative texts, by using the research question “Which strategies and resources appear in the students’ meaning making process?”.
Twelve lessons in three classes (students aged 14-15) in Sweden have been filmed using three video cameras, in which the students read, make meaning and discuss texts individually, in pairs and in groups of four. Intertextual Content Analysis (Hallesson & Visén 2018) was used to examine the transcripts of the video recordings with an expansion to include aspects of visual grammar (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006).
Preliminary findings reveal students’ frequent use of the layout of the texts to identify claims and evidence – a strategy that produced mixed results. Moreover, the students mastered several strategies to check sources, but most students lacked sufficient background knowledge to be able to evaluate the information they found and tended to be uncritical of sources that appeared to be authoritative. When students brought in specialized knowledge or their own experiences into the text conversations, this constituted a resource that often was used for joint meaning-making. However, many students did not examine the texts thoroughly to gain a complex understanding, nor paying attention to different modalities until explicitly asked to. Hence, the students need to learn and practice effective strategies for reading both argumentative and multimodal digital texts in order to learn to use available resources.
Hallesson, Y., & Visén, P. (2018). Intertextual content analysis: an approach for analysing text-related discussions with regard to movability in reading and how text content is handled, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 41(2), 142-155, DOI: 10.1080/1743727X.2016.1219981
Hodge, B. & Kress, G.R. (1988). Social semiotics. Cornell University Press.
Kress, G.R., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design (2 ed.). Routledge.