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High School Literacy in a Digital World
Ashley Bayles
University of British Columbia
40912024
ETEC 511 Section 66C
Matiul Alam
Tuesday, August 7, 2012






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INTRODUCTION
As the world becomes increasing more connected and more digitalized, what is the role of
high school literacy instructors? As a High School English Language Arts teacher I have
been following the latest developments in the field of literacy. English class used to be all
about reading and writing, but now students are reading and writing blogs and wikis. How
does this affect their literacy, and what skills do they need to learn in the classroom in order
to succeed in a world that is constantly changing? I believe that reading and writing are still
two of the most important skills our students need for living in a democratic society; I want
to explore the current research on the topic and see what teachers can do to ensure our
students are getting the literacy skills they need. I believe that despite the fact that students
now have many more opportunities to read and write in their daily lives through digital
media, the specific skill sets required to read and write effectively, online or offline, still
need to be explicitly taught in the classroom. These skills will allow students to be
successful, no matter what the future holds for them.

21
st
CENTURY LEARNING SKILLS
In recent years there has been a trend towards a set of competencies that are called 21
st

century learning skills. The interesting thing about these skills is that while they may be
grouped under a new heading or name, the skills they describe are skills that have been
important for decades now. There are now multiple frameworks that attempt to define the
skills. Voogt and Pareja Roblin (2012) completed a comparative analysis of most of the
major international frameworks and their findings revealed "the central role of ICT across
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the various policy frameworks. ICT is regarded as both (a) an argument for the need of 21st
century competences, and (b) a tool that can support the acquisition and assessment of 21st
century competences. In addition, all frameworks acknowledge that the rapid development
of ICT requires a whole new set of ICT literacy competences that go beyond the mere
operational use of ICT tools and applications" (316). They found that Collaboration,
Communication, ICT literacy and Social/Cultural Skills such as citizenship are mentioned
in all of the frameworks. Creativity, Critical Thinking, Problem-solving, and Devloping
Quality Products/Productivity are mentioned in most of the frameworks studied (Voogt &
Peraja Roblin, 2012).

As teachers we are now faced with the fact that we are attempting to prepare students for
jobs that dont exist yet. The most effective thing we can do for our students is to ensure
that they have the basic skills required so that they can apply their strengths to any field. I
firmly believe that this focus on 21st century learning skills supports the importance of
what we do in the English Language Arts classroom in terms of reading and writing, but
with more focus on the importance of ICT along with these skills. The British Columbia
English Language Arts Curriculum is very good at focusing on many of the skills outlined
in theses framworks and while it does not address the ICT component directly, teachers are
starting to use more and more technology in the classroom to help students develop these
skills.

READING
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I have grown up with a love for reading and I strongly believe that growing up in a
household where I was encouraged to read for pleasure helped me to become a stronger
student. I did well in school because I knew how to read different texts and get the
information I needed from them and understand that information because I had been
practicing this skill every day. Students are already practicing the skills of how to read
texts online, and while we need to continue to aid them in understanding how to read digital
texts, we also need to give them the skills to realize when they dont understand something
and provide steps for them to take so they can decode the meaning in any type of text.

Kris Tovani provides solutions to this by explaining that we just need to break down the
steps for students to follow. For example, he gives four steps for how to make inferences
from what you have read that starts with asking yourself a question about the text. He then
goes on to explain how to go about answering that question. Once students have done so,
they have made an inference about the text. One of the things he provides that I think all
teachers should give to their students is a list of signals to look for when they are reading.
Once students learn to recognize these signals, such as not remembering what they have
read, they will know that they are no longer understanding what they are reading and then
they can use his fix-up strategies, such as making a predication, to help them begin to go
back and understand what they are reading (Tovani, 2000).

Additionally, visual texts are an important part of the web and digital literacy. Something
that all English Language Arts teachers should be doing is teaching students how to
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evaluate features such as graphics and videos and as Bolter (1998 as quoted in Sutherland-
Smith) explained literacy in electronic environments may have more to do with the
production and consumption of images than reading and writing of either hypertexual or
linear prose (p.7). Although we often think that more online reading is non-fiction, it is
important to point our students toward fiction that is online as well and teaching students
the importance of reading both. As Mar & Oakley et al. (2006) discovered, there may
actually be a link between reading fiction and empathy. Their research states stories could
prove a powerful tool for educating both children and adults about understanding others, an
important skill currently under-stressed in most educational settings (Mar & Oakley,
2006). As the abstract from their research points out,
Comprehending characters in a narrative fiction appears to parallel the
comprehension of peers in the actual world, while the comprehension of
expository non-fiction shares no such parallels. Frequent fiction readers may
thus bolster or maintain their social abilities unlike frequent readers of non-
fiction. Lifetime exposure to fiction and non-fiction texts was examined
along with performance on empathy/social-acumen measures. In general,
fiction print-exposure positively predicted measures of social ability, while
non-fiction print-exposure was a negative predictor. The tendency to become
absorbed in a story also predicted empathy scores (Mar & Oakley, 2006).
The importance of good readers being absorbed in a fiction story cannot be overlooked.
Graphic Novels are a great way to bring fiction into the classroom while teaching students
how to understand and interpret the visual clues provided by the author.

With the popularity of the internet and multiliteracies our students now use in their
multimodal lives it is difficult to know where to focus our time. Sutherland-Smith (2002)
suggests that we must also teach our students to effectively access digital texts is to use
proper search techniques. By teaching students how to use key terms and what terms such
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as AND or OR in the search field will turn up we give our students the tools to find
information they need more easily. As teachers our jobs become more difficult with the
popularity of the internet and mobile platforms because our students are constantly
connected and reading information, but not necessarily knowing how. As Sutherland-Smith
states, the Web invites a nonlinear, interactive, nonsequential approach to reading by
students, and the multimedia elements add to the visual literacy skills they require (2002,
p. 668). As we used to teach students to use the library catalogue and book indexes to find
the information they were looking for, we now need to add to that and teach them how to
use the resources on the internet that they are already accessing in their own free time.

One possible way of exploring visuals and online resources could be to have students look
at a visual design website such as Information is Beautiful
(www.informationisbeautiful.net). One of the images I love on this site is an interactive
piece called Mountains Out of Molehills and it shows the number of news articles on things
such as Mad Cow Disease, SARS, or Killer Wasps and then lets you compare that to the
actual number of deaths from each of those things. Of course, more stories does not
necessarily mean more deaths. Interesting discussions could come out about why that is and
how the visual helps students to think about the information they are getting and the
importance of not only knowing, but understanding. By using digital resources for reading
in the classroom, students can read what they want, when they want.

WRITING
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I believe that recently there has been an increase in appreciation for the importance of
teaching writing. However, that is not to say that it has the place it deserves in the
classroom. Often, subject area teachers believe that they only need to focus on content, and
dont focus much on instructing students how to write in that subject area. Hodge (2010)
provides a framework based on the purposes of writing and the assumptions that go along
with these purposes for how we can incorporate and teach writing in the classroom. She
provides ten assumptions that we must have in order to successfully teach writing in the
high school classroom and designs activities based around them:
Assumption 1
Classroom writing activities should reflect the ultimate goal of enabling students to write
whole texts which form connected, contextualized, and appropriate pieces of
communication.
Assumption 2
Students need opportunities to practise various forms and functions of writing and within
these to develop the different skills involved in producing written texts.
Assumption 3
When setting writing activities, teachers need to vary the audience, identify who the readers
are to be, and try to make every piece of writing fulfil some kind of communicative
purpose, either real or simulated. When students understand the context, they are much
more likely to write effectively and appropriately.
Assumption 4
Classroom writing activities need to be set up in ways that reflect the writing process in
good writers. We need to encourage students to go through a process of planning,
organizing, composing, and revising.
Assumption 5
The process of marking, with its traditional focus on error correction by the teacher, needs
review and modification into a range of activities involving students in reviewing and
revising their work as well as teachers. In other words it becomes a process of improving.
Assumption 6
Students need time in the classroom for writing. The teachers task is to select or design
activities which support them through the process of producing a piece of writing.
Assumption 7
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Collaborative writing in the classroom generates discussion and activities which encourage
an effective process of writing.
Assumption 8
Teachers need to introduce students to sources of help for writing and ensure that they can
use them effectively.
Assumption 9
Encouraging extensive writing outside the classroom is a worthwhile activity as it gives
students opportunities to develop their competence and confidence.
Assumption 10
Teachers write with and for their students (Hodge, 2010, pp. 10-15)

These assumptions are important for teachers to keep in mind because even as adults these
are true. I feel much less motivated, even as a self-motivated Master of Educational
Technology student, to write a paper that is only for the teacher as an audience, then I
would be to write an opinion piece for a newspaper or a blog. Of course, academia is not
always set up so that we can avoid writing long essays, but the form of the essay has
become less relevant as shorter forms of writing and sharing information have taken over.
Sometimes we believe that a choice of topics will give students the motivation they need,
but really we need to be good guides for them and mentor them through the process.
Assumption 8 also ties into the concept I mentioned earlier of teaching students how to
search properly on the web. If students know how to access resources to help them with
their writing and how to read them and critique them then our students will feel much more
empowered in daily life. If they always have to ask the teacher how to do something then
we are not doing our job.

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Students know that being able to write is important if they feel that the writing they do can
actually make a difference. Why dont they share their book reviews with their classmates
to help them choose what book to read next? Why cant they write a letter to the principal
explaining their stance on school uniforms? When students know their audience they can
then have an easier time with their writing. Giving students writing tasks that they see as
authentic require a purpose, and audience and a specific form. Once students have written
these types of texts themselves they will be better readers when facing these types of texts
in the future. Barrett (2012) provides great examples of how to create an e-portfolio for
your students writing and the reasons why they are effective.

Writing helps students to succeed and even that writers make better readers, just like
readers make better writers. The two skills go hand in hand. It is important for teachers to
acknowledge that writing is hard, but rewarding. If teachers model for their students, then
students will see that even teachers and professional writers struggle with writing, so it is
important to keep trying even if it is difficult.

READING AND WRITING DIGITALLY
I doubt we will find many people who say that reading and writing is not important;
however, most reading and writing these days is now occurring online. Our classrooms do
not always have technology and we cannot always have our students read online texts or
writer online texts. That being said, when we give them reading materials we need to give
them a mix of materials from blog posts, to online articles, to tweets, to magazine articles,
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to newspaper articles, to writing on bathroom walls. We are constantly reading and not
even noticing. We learn to read visual cues in our environment, and need to do the same for
all texts we encounter. There are so many types of literacies that students face on a daily
basis that we must equip them to deal with all literacies by giving them a strong foundation.
If teachers have the opportunity to engage students in an online environment such as
Moodle or Wordpress, the teacher must still teach students how to read textual clues in
those environments, same goes for student writing in those environments. A student that
knows how to write a journal entry might not understand the form of a blog post and the
importance of hyperlinking and images in blogging. By teaching students how to navigate
the web and combining that with teaching them proper writing skills by giving authentic
writing assignments using proper pedagogical techniques our students will have a better
chance for success.

One interesting study done by Lending (2010) has First Year students use an online wiki in
order to collaborate on the creation of a study guide that they would then use to study for
the final exam of that same course. The research found that having about three outcomes
per student for the study guide allows each student to contribute enough to make it
meaningful and is small enough to manageable. The study found that grades on the exam
increased an average of five percent after students started doing this assignment. Students
were working together by adding specific examples and improving upon each others work
so that the final result was greater than any of them could have achieved on their own. This
is just one example of how online tools are becoming an expansion in the types of writing
and reading opportunities students have, but they still need to be taught and modeled in
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these new environments. In a digital world, the role of the teacher becomes even more
important.

The main conclusion I have come from through all my research and classroom experience
is that students still love to read and write and while the ways they read and write might
change, that does not mean that books or pens and papers have become obsolete. We just
need to add new tools to complement the traditional ones and provide a proper pedagogical
method to teaching students how to read and write using these new tools. The skills they
learn in English Language Arts are the ones that will help them deal with their future
personal and professional lives in a positive manner.











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References
Barrett, H. C. (March 5, 2012). ePortfolios: A generic model to develop ePortfolios with
open source or web 2.0 tools. Retrieved, 2012, from
http://electronicportfolios.org/eportfolios/
Hodge, T. (2010). In Maley A. (Ed.), Writing (Second Edition ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lee, J & McCandless, D (Graphic Designers). (2011). Mountains Out of Molehills
[Interactives], Retrieved from: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/mountains-
out-of-molehills/
Lending, D. (2010). Using a wiki to collaborate on a study guide. Journal of Information
Systems Education, 21(1), 5-13.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus
nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability,
and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality,
40(5), 694-712. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.002
Sutherland-Smith, W. (2002). Weaving the literacy web: Changes in reading from page to
screen. Reading Teacher, 55(7), 662.
Tovani, Kris. (2000). I Read It, But I Dont Get It, Stenhouse.
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Voogt, J., & Roblin, N. P. (2012). A comparative analysis of international frameworks for
21st century competences: Implications for national curriculum policies. Journal of
Curriculum Studies, 44(3), 299-321. doi:10.1080/00220272.2012.668938