Researching Young Children’s Literacy Practices in Online Virtual Worlds: Cyber- ethnography and Multi- method Approaches

2013 ◽  
pp. 211-225
Author(s):  
Karim Hesham Shaker Ibrahim

Video/digital games have grown into sophisticated, realistic, and engaging problem-solving virtual worlds that have their own literacy practices, affinity spaces, and online virtual communities. As a result, various studies have examined theirs to promote L2 learning and literacy. The findings of these studies suggest that digital games can promote multilingual communication, L2 vocabulary development, and situated L2 use. However, promising these findings, to-date little is known about the specific dynamics of gameplay that can facilitate L2 learning. To address this gap in the literature, this chapter will draw on interdisciplinary research on digital gaming from literacy studies, games' studies, and narratology to account for the L2 learning potentials of digital games. To explain their L2 learning potentials, the chapter will conceptualize digital games as dynamic texts, affinity spaces, and semiotic ecologies, and discuss the implications of each conceptualization for game-based L2 learning and teaching.


Author(s):  
Aijuan Cun

Abstract Researchers have investigated how family literacy practices can effectively support children’s literacy development in school. However, few studies have explored the lived experiences of Burmese refugee families in the United States. Utilizing a social semiotics multimodal perspective, this qualitative study examines how two Burmese refugee children made meaning by blending different modes. The data sources include video recordings, artifacts, and interviews. The findings illustrate three major themes that span time and space: family past experiences across global contexts, representation of current life experiences in the United States, and family beliefs carried across global contexts and Gawa’s dream for the future. The findings also show that the participants drew upon multimodal semiotic resources to create and share family storybooks. Implications include the importance of integrating multimodal perspectives into classroom learning and the possibilities of bridging home and school literacy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori E. Skibbe ◽  
Dorit Aram

Twenty kindergartners (eight boys) with cerebral palsy (CP) and their mothers engaged in a writing activity that required dyads to compose a grocery list containing four items together. Maternal writing supports were observed, including graphophonemic mediation (i.e., support for letter–sound correspondence) and printing mediation (i.e., guidance on letter choice and form). Mothers described their home literacy practices, and children’s early literacy skills were assessed. Mothers reported engaging in many literacy activities with their children. They also provided variable levels of printing mediation, low levels of graphophonemic mediation, rarely corrected children’s writing errors, and frequently provided physical supports to children during the writing activity. Mothers’ reported literacy activities at home as well the ways in which they helped children choose letters were strongly related to children’s literacy skills. Findings suggest that mothers can bolster their children’s literacy skills through carefully orchestrated writing activities when children have CP.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 2415-2426
Author(s):  
Karen Daniels ◽  
Kim Bower ◽  
Cathy Burnett ◽  
Hugh Escott ◽  
Amanda Hatton ◽  
...  

AbstractFor many young children in developed countries, family and community life is mediated by digital technology. Despite this, for early years educators, the process of integrating digital technologies into classroom practice raises a number of issues and tensions. In an attempt to gain insights from early years teachers, we draw from semi-structured interview data from ten practising teachers which explored their perspectives on digital technologies within their personal and professional lives, and of children’s use of digital technologies within and outside educational settings. Our analysis builds on previous work that suggests that teachers draw on multiple discourses related to conceptualisations of childhood when thinking about digital technology and young children. In this paper we contribute to these discussions, drawing specifically on examples from the data where teachers articulate their understandings of children’s use of digital technology where this relates directly to children’s literacy practices. We assert that narrow conceptualized notions of literacy, compounded by national imperatives to raise print literacy standards, add another layer of discursive complexity that comes to the fore when teachers are asked to provide a rationale for the promotion of digital literacies in early years classrooms. A broader framing of literacy therefore, is needed if the potential of digital technologies in the early years is to be realized.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-731
Author(s):  
Lucy Henning

In this paper, I argue that the mainstream assumptions that inform current educational policy and practice for young children’s in-school literacy development in schools are insufficient to secure a helpful account of young children’s classroom literacy practices. A particular problem lies with the reliance of such policy and practice on perspectives that assume, first, that literacy acquisition comprises the orderly acquisition of predefined concepts, skills and knowledge; and second, that the task of schools is to bring individual children’s concepts, skills and knowledge of literacy in line with what is considered ‘normal’ for their age. I argue that such perspectives are too narrow to secure a clear enough view of the complex phenomenon of young children’s encounter with being taught to read and write in school. In this paper, I present two alternative theoretical lenses through which the familiar phenomenon of young children’s encounter with being schooled in literacy can be viewed: first, that of Literacy as a Social Practice (henceforth LSP); and second, that of ‘interpretive reproduction’, a theoretical account of young children’s participation in their social worlds developed by William Corsaro. To demonstrate how helpful such perspectives can be in understanding the familiar phenomenon of young children’s literacy schooling, I apply them to the analysis of one child, Dean’s, encounter with schooled literacy within the social world of an early twenty-first century London classroom.


2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Jackson ◽  
Robert Larzelere ◽  
Lisa St. Clair ◽  
Marcia Corr ◽  
Carol Fichter ◽  
...  

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris D. Gutiérrez ◽  
Andrea C. Bien ◽  
Makenzie K. Selland ◽  
Daisy M. Pierce

In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue that the social organization of learning should privilege participation in dynamic, hybrid literacy practices. Children are often more likely to experiment with English and academic genres, while also taking on powerful identities as learners and language users, when formal and informal modes of communication are leveraged, multimodality and language-crossing encouraged and the use of both home and academic vernaculars promoted within a context that values social relationships and the playful imagination. We argue that children’s literacy practices develop in particular social and ‘located’ relationships, and we examine one such after-school setting designed with these principles in mind, the long-standing UC Links/Las Redes partnership, where home languages and intercultural experiences are unmarked and necessarily integral to participating in the shared practices of the community. We highlight the affordance of one common practice of the community, children s communication with the mythical cyber wizard, El Maga (sic), and the ways this practice strategically draws on students full linguistic toolkits in order to invite them to integrate modes and genres of communication that challenge the divide between everyday and school-based literacies, stretching children beyond their current levels of literacy development.


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