Barriers to teachers using digital texts in literacy classrooms

In many accounts of school literacy teaching and learning, there are claims that young people's familiarity with digital texts (ICTs) could provide teachers with opportunities to plan exciting and innovative activities. It would seem, however, that despite intensive research and exemplary practices over the last 20 years, the infiltration of ICTs into literacy classrooms is not widespread. This paper reports on one study where teachers discussed, argued and thought about their uses of digital texts in their classrooms. It provides some insight into the reasons why literacy teachers do not engage with digital texts as part of their everyday literacy activities. It also shows teachers using institutional and societal discourses about the value of students' home experiences to their schooling, the production of digital texts for presentation of print‐based work and the importance of technical knowledge about computers and new technologies, to describe and in part to overcome the barriers to using new technologies in their literacy classrooms.     

The Book of the Film: Enhancing Print Literacy at KS 3

This article concerns the ways in which moving image media enable secondary school students to improve their print literacy standards. It examines productive ways of using moving image media with literary texts to support and enhance the literacy skills of students. It contends that informed use of media enhances students' abilities in critically evaluating, consuming and producing texts and that engaging with print and media texts develops the literacy practices of students.     

Doing Mathematics with Purpose: Mathematical Text Types

Mathematical literacy includes learning to read and write different types of mathematical texts as part of purposeful mathematical meaning making. Thus in this article, we describe how learning to read and write mathematical texts (proof text, algorithmic text, algebraic/symbolic text, and visual text) supports the development of students' mathematical literacy. Explicit instruction about how to engage with each text type helps to build students' awareness of the function of mathematical texts and of how to leverage them to support the doing of mathematics. Teachers and leaders can use this discussion of mathematical text types to organize and conceptualize instruction within a disciplinary literacy orientation.     

Exploring urban print environments: a comparative study across San Antonio and Santiago and implications for early childhood literacy practices

In this study, we compared the types of texts found in two metropolitan areas (Santiago, Chile, and San Antonio, TX, USA) as a way of documenting the sponsorship of literacy within these two communities. We found (roughly) equal number of texts across the sites but interesting patterns within each. San Antonio's texts were primarily sponsored by industry and the military and Santiago's texts by political and religious sponsors. Similarly, there were statistically significant differences in the types of texts across neighbourhoods based on how well they were historically resourced. Our findings have implications for teaching early literacy through environmental print.     

A Conceptual Framework for Emergent Digital Literacy

As we progress in the 21st century, children learn to become proficient readers and writers of both digital and non-digital texts. Knowledge, skills, and understandings of literacy emerge through sociocultural interactions with non-digital tools (e.g., paper-printed books) and digital tools (e.g., touch screen tablets). However, debate is ongoing over the role that digital experiences play in emergent literacy development. Researchers have voiced the need to conceptualise a common framework for literacy development that considers the emergence of digital literacy skills alongside conventional literacy skills and how these skills might interact during development. This is particularly important in light of the increasing use of digital texts used by young children, such as E-books and digital games. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that might guide research and practice by examining the relationships between emergent literacy skills, emergent digital literacy skills, and proficiency in reading and writing.     

Four Blocks for Literacy

The literacy hour within the National Literacy Strategy is now part of primary classroom practice in the UK. That literacy hour consists of four distinct parts which are debated here. In addition an alternative Four Blocks framework, as used by some schools in the USA, is explored. The differences between those approaches are noted which raise questions about the time allocation, a sustained involvement with reading and writing, and teacher autonomy in the literacy hour.     

“They get enough of that at home”: understanding aversion to popular culture in schools

This paper sets out to try and understand why, in the face of a growing body of research and opinion that favours the utilisation of popular texts to teach literacy ( Marsh & Millard, 2000, Dyson, 2001 , Bromley, 2001), teachers in a research and development project in Southeast England, still had an aversion to embracing children's interest in popular culture. It will argue that the professional position the teachers take is an understandable one in view of the issues surrounding conceptions of literacy, the nature of the pleasure that popular texts evoke, and the alienation to school literacy and culture that these texts can induce. In a discussion of literacy, the paper will argue that, surprisingly, the teachers in the project who did not wish to use popular culture in their classrooms share similar traditional conceptions of literacy with many of those who advocate the use of popular texts in the classroom.     

Worlds have collided and modes have merged: classroom evidence of changed literacy practices

Debates continue in public and in educational policy forums about the ‘basics’ of literacy while many have not recognised that these basics may never be the same again. Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of music, photography and film. At the same time, educational policy and national testing requirements are still principally focused on the reading and writing of print‐based texts. This paper examines evidence from classroom research to analyse the nature of multimodal literacy, the literacy that is needed in contemporary times for reading, viewing, responding to and producing multimodal and digital texts. Examples of students' engagement in multimodal literacy are presented to demonstrate how classroom literacy practices can incorporate the practices of talking, listening, reading and writing together with processing the modes of written text, image, sound and movement in print and digital texts.     

The effect of individual differences in the inner and outer states of ICT on engagement in online reading activities and PISA 2009 reading literacy: Exploring the relationship between the old and new reading literacy

With the prevalence of ICT, the concept of reading literacy has evolved to encompass both online reading and printed texts. This study clarifies the relationship between reading printed texts and online electronic texts from the perspective of individual differences in the inner and outer phases of ICT in a partial mediation model. We used the PISA 2009 data with 297,295 fifteen-year-old students (49.6% males) across 42 regions. The inner state of ICT represents students' attitude toward computers and confidence in high-level ICT tasks, whereas the outer state of ICT represents students' access to ICT facilities at home or school. The indirect results showed students' reading literacy improved with better attitude toward computers, confidence, and ICT availability at home, as long as the effect was mediated through engagement in online reading activities, even though availability of ICT at home had a direct and negative impact on PISA 2009 reading literacy.     

Exploring practices of multiliteracies pedagogy through digital technologies: a narrative inquiry

Digital technologies have fast become integral within literacy learning and teaching across contexts as students engage with a variety of digital and multimodal texts. While teachers in New Zealand schools have a high degree of autonomy in the design and planning of literacy programs, little is currently known about how they understand and enact multiliteracies pedagogy (MLP). Using data gathered via interviews and classroom observations in an intermediate school in New Zealand, this article adopts a narrative inquiry approach to explore one teacher's approaches to using digital technologies and texts within literacy instruction. We explore in particular the ways in which MLP may be enacted implicitly rather than explicitly, within the complex matrix of teachers' personal beliefs and learning experiences, the perceived learning needs of students, and the school curriculum. We conclude with a call for the conscious and purposeful teaching of MLP, focusing on synaesthesia and the semiotic functions of texts.     

Failing with grace: kids,Improv and embodied literacies

In this article, we explore the idea that comedy, with its often unorthodox ways of looking at, experiencing, and responding to the world, offers untold possibility for classroom literacy instruction. The article focuses on the potential of Improv comedy as socio‐materialist literacy in the classroom. It provides an account of Improv as a form of embodied literacy that operates as an assemblage created collectively between many people, practices, and material objects. We present findings from interviews with professional comedians regarding the possibilities of comedy for language and literacy instruction with elementary school children. The article then examines a moment from the subsequent classroom phase of the study to look at ways Improv can help students create stories and ways that laughter can be used to create a cohesive assemblage based around students' spontaneous creation of texts. The aim of the article is to provide educators with a practical means to apply socio‐materialist literacy in their classrooms through Improv, which will, in turn, allow students to create collectively generated texts and assemblages.     

Globalising assessment: an ethnography of literacy assessment,camels and fast food in the Mongolian Gobi

What happens when standardised literacy assessments travel globally? The paper presents an ethnographic account of adult literacy assessment events in rural Mongolia. It examines the dynamics of literacy assessment in terms of the movement and re-contextualisation of test items as they travel globally and are received locally by Mongolian respondents. The analysis of literacy assessment events is informed by Goodwin's ‘participation framework’ on language as embodied and situated interactive phenomena and by Actor Network Theory. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is applied to examine literacy assessment events as processes of translation shaped by an ‘assemblage’ of human and non-human actors (including the assessment texts).     

Leveraging critical literacies for social change: questioning the culture of compliance at an ‘F’ school

This article traces the experiences of two veteran elementary school teachers in the urban Southwest, who are positioned by district and state policy ‘texts’ as insubordinate and failing, and who employ critical literacy practices to reconstruct and redesign these texts as they seek to create more equitable and humane conditions in schools. Stemming from a larger phenomenological study, this article explores how teachers in a ‘failing’ elementary school in the Southwestern US understand and negotiate district, state, and federal policies and examines how these policies shape and inform their identities as professionals. This research has important implications concerning the potential of critical literacy as a mode of resistance, the promise inherent in school/university partnerships for promoting change, and the ways in which the practice of deconstructing/reconstructing dehumanizing texts can foster a re-professionalization of teaching.     

Image–language interaction in online reading environments: challenges for students’ reading comprehension

This paper presents the qualitative results of a study of students’ reading of multimodal texts in an interactive, online environment. The study forms part of a larger project which addressed image–language interaction as an important dimension of language pedagogy and assessment for students growing up in a multimedia digital age. Thirty-two Year 6 students representing a sample of high, medium and low performers on an Australian state-wide school literacy test were surveyed about their internet usage and interviewed using a structured protocol while working online through a selection of materials from an educational website. Findings from the earlier stages of the project indicated that different types of image-text relations vary in the degree of difficulty they pose for students’ reading comprehension. This phase of the project extended the analysis of image-text relations to online, interactive texts. Student performance on online reading tasks and interview data are used to illustrate some of the complexities students encounter when reading online, and how this may vary with factors such as their day-to-day literacy experiences and levels of engagement. The results have implications for literacy pedagogy and assessing the reading of web-based texts.     

The Development of Popular Literacy in the Nordic Countries. A Comparative Historical Study

In all Nordic countries illiteracy was eradicated in two stages. Two different strategies were used: home instruction in Sweden, Finland and Iceland, and compulsory schooling in Denmark and Norway. During the first stage the general population acquired the ability to read familiar texts. Sweden started its campaign first, around the mid‐eighteenth century, and became the first Nordic literate nation in this meaning of literacy. In the second stage the concept literacy covered both ability to read (known and unknown texts) and write. Due to its excellent school system Denmark was the first Nordic country to attain literacy in the contemporary meaning of the term (around the mid‐nineteenth century). The other Nordic countries followed in the same order as their elementary schools were developed.     

Parental involvement in literacy development: using media texts

This paper reports on a small‐scale project which aimed to build upon the existing home literacy practices of a group of three‐ and four‐year‐old children living in the UK. The purpose of the project was to develop literacy materials and resources which could be borrowed from nursery and used within the home to promote children’s literacy development. Children’s informal literacy practices at home were identified using literacy diaries, which 18 families completed over a four‐week period. These documented children’s reading of both printed and televisual texts. In addition, interviews were conducted with 15 parents and carers. The paper reports on the findings from this stage of the project, which indicate that much of children’s reading was focused on popular cultural and media texts. Media boxes were developed as a literacy resource for use by parents and children in the home. The use of these media boxes by three families was documented and the initial findings, which suggest that the use of such resources draws on families’ cultural capital, discussed.     

Reading Multimodal Texts: Perceptual,Structural and Ideological Perspectives

This article presents a tripartite framework for analyzing multimodal texts. The three analytical perspectives presented include: (1) perceptual, (2) structural, and (3) ideological analytical processes. Using Anthony Browne’s picturebook Piggybook as an example, assertions are made regarding what each analytical perspective brings to the interpretation of multimodal texts and how these perspectives expand readers’ interpretive repertoires. Drawing on diverse fields of inquiry, including semiotics, art theory, visual grammar, communication studies, media literacy, visual literacy and literary theory, the article suggests an expansion of the strategies and analytical perspectives readers being to multimodal texts and visual images. Each perspective is presented as necessary but insufficient in and of itself to provide the necessary foundation for comprehending texts. It is through an expansion of the interpretive strategies and perspectives that readers bring to a multimodal text, focusing on visual, textual, and design elements that readers will become more proficient in their interpretive processes.     

Learning literacy though play using interactive texts during storybook reading: A parent/child experience

Abstract

Based on first hand field notes, I undertook to research the reasons why children interacted or did not interact appropriately with a common emergent literacy experience, the readaloud. I explored the reasons why par‐ents/caregivers may not effectively participate in storybook reading, including reactions of parents/caregivers during four literacy events. I determined that the key to successful literacy experiences were first hand, personal involvement of the children in an active learning experience associated with interactive texts. Here, children were invited to create appropriate actions to accompany the story readings. Interactive texts appear to hold the key to successful early literacy experiences for preschoolers. © 2005 Published by Elsevier Inc.     

Collective Literacy Autobiographies: Exploring issues of authority,positioning and discourse

While a great deal of recent research and pedagogical interventions have focused on the development of critical reading practices of students, less attention has been given to developing critical writing practices. A move from a critical reading to a critical writing pedagogy would involve the application of the same general critical literacy principles, such as (1) repositioning students as researchers of language and (2) problematizing classroom texts [Comber (1994) Critical literacy: An introduction to Australian debates and perspectives, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 26, 655-668]. But while in critical reading classes these principles are applied to the language and texts of others, in a critical writing class they would have to be extended to the students' own language and texts. This paper describes the effects of interventions with students training to be teachers, which asked them to record their past literacy experiences in collective autobiographies, and to disrupt, i.e., critically analyse, them in order to instigate change in consciousness and in their future practice as literacy teachers. The author's focus is on a group around a particular student, Radha, and how the course helped them make sense of, and overcome their hesitancy to write from positions of authority. The author also describes how Radha learned to understand the difficulties she faced in her assignments when straddling conflicting subject positions.     

Research into literacy and technology in primary classrooms: an exploration of understandings generated by recent studies

While much has been written about the implications for ‘literacy’ of practices surrounding digital technologies, there has been surprisingly little research investigating new literacies in primary classrooms. This review examines the kinds of understandings that have been generated through studies of primary literacy and technology reported during the period 2000–2006. It uses Green's distinction between ‘operational’, ‘cultural’ and ‘critical’ dimensions of primary literacy to investigate the focus and methodology of 38 empirical studies. It explores ways in which research may be informed by assumptions and practices associated with print literacy, but also highlights the kinds of studies which are beginning to investigate the implications of digital texts for primary education. The paper concludes by arguing for further ethnographic and phenomenological studies of classroom literacy practices in order to explore the complex contexts which surround and are mediated by digital texts.