Defining New Literacies
Literacy Divide Realities: Language Collaboration Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marcelle Harran
The paper describes a situated higher education collaboration project aimed to develop the literacy levels of engineering students to meet the high expectations of a competitive workplace amid employer concerns that engineering graduate communication competencies are lacking and insufficient. For the project, the language and engineering lecturers focused their collaboration on negotiating the rhetorical and content requirements of the design report as a genre. This facilitated making the often tacit discourse understandings and report requirements explicit so that they were mutually-understood and pedagogically overt. There have been few studies on collaboration processes, which is often a messy, complex and lengthy process requiring sustained collaboration spaces and constant negotiation so that the criteria for producing “legitimate text” is not opaque but transparent and explicit. The study used a mixed methodology and the data collection included student and lecturer questionnaires as well as an interview with the engineering lecturer to assess his perceptions of the collaboration practices instituted. During the four-year collaboration period, the language practitioner increasingly gained design report “inside knowledge” of concept selection processes as well as specific rhetorical and discourse structures required to produce the text by co-constructing understanding and knowledge with the engineering lecturer.
Case for Information Literacy: First-Year Students' Difficulty Evaluating Internet Sources
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elise Silva
Students struggle evaluating the reliability of online sources. This paper will present original research into source evaluation habits of first year students. Students were given 5 internet sources to evaluate for reliability. Researchers observed their source evaluation habits and report findings and discuss information literacy implications of the study. Librarians at Brigham Young University studied first year students' internet source evaluation habits and found that students have difficulty using diverse source evaluation techniques for complex information needs.
Towards New Literacies? : Digitalization and Literature in Foreign Language Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christiane Lütge, Thorsten Merse
Digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. A major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (‘romance of the book’ vs. euphoric ‘media heavens’) and crossing over into a vision in which digital and literary education are intertwined. In this talk, we will explore different (and new?) literary and digital literacy practices that are crucial for learners to engage with – or read – digital literary texts. In order to articulate such literacy practices at the intersection of the digital and the literary, we will provide an in-depth analysis of available digital literary texts (ranging from simple media-supported literature to complex interactive and multimodal texts). This analysis will yield a typology of digital literatures serving as a conceptual basis to define new, or combine established, digital-literary literacies. This might support the integration of new digital literary forms into foreign language research and teaching practice. We argue that the concept of multiliteracies is particularly productive in framing engagements with digital literatures in that they stress the necessity of fostering a competent command of diverse meaning-making modes (Kalantzis/Cope/Chan/Dalley-Trim 2016). To support our suggestions, we also draw on a range of international studies in the fields of literacies education and 21st century literatures.
e-Learning Readiness of University Students and Effect on Academic Achievement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sule Betul Tosuntas
e-Learning, which enters our lives through technology, is getting widespread with the opportunities and possibilities offered. e-Learning is learning environment that is presented online without time and space limitations. While e-learning has great advantages in terms of accessibility, the ability of e-learning to be effective and productive depends to great extent on the readiness of individuals and institutions. e-learning readiness, defined as the ability of an organization or individual to take advantage of online learning, appears to be directly related to learning and achievement. In this respect, it is emphasized that the level of readiness of stakeholders should be determined in e-learning applications. The aim of this research is to determine the effect of university students' e-learning readiness on academic achievement. In the research, correlational design was used to examine relationships between variables. The study was conducted with university students participating voluntarily. The fact that students are enrolled in a course on the open and distance learning system was considered as criteria. Students who met these criteria filled scale online via the open and distance learning system they were enrolled in. In the research, e-learning readiness of students was gathered with a scale form of 33 items with Likert type in 7 factors. The academic achievement of students was considered as the achievement score of online course they were enrolled in. Descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analysis were used in the analysis of the data. The analysis of the data is ongoing, findings and conclusions will be presented later.
