Electronic literacy practices in English teaching: a case study

[摘要] ABSTRACTThis research is a Qualitative Case Study which investigates the electronic literacypractices of one English teacher and two Grade 10 English classes in a Muslim Highschool outside of Johannesburg. This study seeks to find out what the forms of electronicliteracy used in the classroom are and for what purposes these are used. It is also aimed atinvestigating how the students in the English classroom engage with these forms ofelectronic literacies and whether or not gender plays a role in their engagement.This study draws on work in New Literacy Studies, particularly theories of literacy associal practice, Multiliteracies and multimodality as well as current research in the fieldof electronic literacy. Although there have been numerous studies in the fields ofelectronic literacy and digital literacy in developed contexts like the United Kingdom andAustralia, there is a paucity of research in South Africa in the field and particularly in thearea of electronic literacy in the English classroom.The main sources of data were: classroom observations from which field notes werecreated and group interviews with the students as well as an interview with the Englishteacher. The findings of this study reveal that being electronically literate in the Englishclassroom means having access to sophisticated forms of technology not only inside theclassroom but also outside as well as having a certain degree of fluency around computeruse. The forms of electronic literacy used by the English teacher and the purposes forwhich they were used demonstrate his pedagogy in English and the social forces thatshape the production of this pedagogy. The research shows an expansion of the teacher’srole in the English classroom as he is no longer only 'a mediator of learning’ but amediator of technology. The status of the text has also changed as the 'disappearance’ ofprint-based texts from the classroom was noted with the foregrounding of visual texts andhypertexts. It was found that the students on the whole were engaged with the technologyused in the classroom and expressed a preference for its integration into their lessons asopposed to the traditional 'reading and writing’ practices. Additionally, students’engagement did not vary according to gender.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand