Summary
SUMMARY
(PART 1)
- TITLE: “Blogging and Emergent L2 Literacy Development in an Urban
Elementary School: A Functional Perspective”
- AUTHORS: Meg Gebhard, Dong-Shin Shin and Wendy Seger
- URL: http://journals.sfu.ca/CALICO/index.php/calico/article/view/895
·
PURPOSE OF STUDY: To analyze how a
teacher in the United States used systemic functional linguistics to design a
blog-mediated writing curriculum to support second grade English language
learners’ (ELLs) literacy development and abilities to use computer-mediated
communication tools for social and academic purposes in and out of school.
- STATEMENT OF PROBLEM: This study is to
address the gap where those attending high-poverty urban and rural
schools, are less likely than middle class counterparts to have access to
technologies that would support academic language development in the
research and pedagogical literature.
- RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
1)
How did blogging practices shape
the nature of ELLs’ literacy practices in an
elementary school context?
2) How did ELLs’ emergent literacy practices and
abilities able to produce written
texts change over time as evidenced by blog postings?
- PARTICIPANT:
Focus on one Puerto Recan student called “Diany”.
- METHODOLOGY:
1) Research setting
and participant
Ø
Conducted in a large urban elementary school
in a former industrial city in New England.
Ø
Nearly all were failing the state mandated
exams in reading, English language arts, and mathematics (Massachusetts
Department of Education, profiles.doe.mass.edu/search)
Ø
A second-language “struggling reader and
writer”
Data collects
Data collection and
analysis combined the tools of classroom ethnography (Dyson, 1993) and genre
analysis using the tools of SFL (Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Martin &
Rose, 2008).
Data analysis
i)Analysis of these data occurred in three phases. Phase one consisted
of a content analysis of the activities associated with each unit of study. The
purpose of this phase was to describe the classroom and online literacy
activity systems, identify major trends in the data, and accomplish the interim
task of data reduction. Phase two consisted of profiling Diany’s literacy practices
as she engaged in classroom and online activities related to producing target
genres (e.g., letters, recounts, explanations, reports, arguments). Last, phase
three centered on analyzing the linguistic features of Diany’s posted texts using
the tools of SFL (e.g., genre and register features of student texts; see
Martin & Rose, 2008; Christie & Derewianka, 2008).
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS:
- An analysis of
the data discloses that the subject used the class blog to communicate
with an extended audience for a wide range of academic and social purposes
in ways that also expanded the subject semiotic resources. In SFL terms,
subject used blogging in interpersonal ways to build and show social roles
associated to being a valued peer and good student. Simultaneously, she established
a greater metalinguistic awareness of the semiotic resources available in
online communication to textually display these roles as well as to better
achieve the flow of her written discourse. Consequently, subject developed
an ability to produce more varied and complex clause structures, a greater
control over tense and modality, and a better understanding of the
differences between oral and printed discourse. In the following
discussion, researchers illustrate how subject used blogging to
communicate with an expanded audience by analyzing how she (1) completed
genre-based class assignments, (2) provided other students with feedback on
their writing, and (3) constructed and displayed social boundaries and
status. Finally, researchers provide an analysis of subjects language
development through blogging over the course of the 22 months of the
study.
COMMENTS:
Ø
The purpose of the study may not be practical
to all students since they only focus on one student.
Ø
The research may be improved by future
researcher with more participants in order to obtain more accurate result.
0 comments:
Post a Comment