Scarica LEARNING TO READ IN A DIGITAL WORLD- Riassunto breve e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! LEARNING TO READ IN A DIGITAL WORLD CAP 1: READING AND DIGITAL MEDIA (EUROPEAN PROSPECTIVE) Discussion on the presence of the new media has always developed between utopian enthusiasm and elevated hopes about the potential of new technologies. One of the biggest fears his that children will be tempted to spend more time online at the expense of more valuable and important activities. The emphasis on falling literacy standards: shorter attention spans or lower reading speed and comprehension level- caused anxiety about the digital natives’ academic achievement and general prospectives for the future. On the other hand, young media users have become prosumers and “cyberkids” able to critically interpreting media contents. As LIVINGSTONE explains, both approaches fail to acknowledge the impact of screen reading on, for example, reducing the gender and socioeconomic gaps among young people. One of the biggest theories about social and cultural consequences of TV use points out that the critical factor shaping the influence shaping the influence of TV exposure on children’s academic achievement is not the medium itself but the context of family as a learning environment. However, they also proposed that reading print and TV viewing involve mental process that are to some extent similar, and the comprehending film narratives can develop children’s reading skills and motivate them to read printed texts. SCHMIDT and ANDERSON, instead, suggest that it may discourage the development of the mental capacities necessary to master new academic skills such as visual imagination and attention span. In general, we can say that users often engage in multitasking activities, for example surfing the Internet while watching TV. Such process forms the basis of transmedia entertainment and converge culture. The Survey “Children’s and Young People’s Reading in 2015” showed that girls are more likely to read diverse technology-based materials as well as books. This was reflected in more positive attitudes to reading on the part of the girls. The EU Kids Online network has discovered the following types of parental mediation with reference to older children (9- 16 years old) like: ACTIVE MEDIATION Sharing and discussing online activities SAFETY MEDIATION Advising and guiding on managing risks RESTRICTIONS Rules and bans TECHNICAL MEDIATION Use of filters, parental controls MONITORING Checking the computer/social media/phones after use These types of parental mediation reflect general parenting styles but at the same time they are influenced by parents’ own digital literacy. Parents who believe that their children are more expert media users than themselves are likely to be less confident of mediating their children’s interactions with new media and are less aware of both risks and opportunities. Parents from Central and Southern European countries, Ireland and the UK adopt restrictive mediation, parents from Northern European countries prefer active mediation, and parents from Eastern European countries resorting to all types of parental mediation or being passive. In another German Study from 2012, it was also established that the more children looked at or read print-based stories at home, the better communication and language skills they had developed at age five. Last but not least, children of lower socioeconomic status who had access to tablets were found to be twice as likely to look at or read stories on a touchscreen daily, which clearly indicates that there are benefits to looking at or sharing stories using a touchscreen device, particularly for children of lower socioeconomic status, especially when they lack support from their parents. Another project called “Young Children and digital technology showed how children between 0-8 acquire digital literacy even before they learn to read and write. Finally, the cultural habitus connected to family’s socioeconomic status is reproduced through media socialisation, resulting in more intensive reading behaviour of children coming from higher SES families. Libraries, in this sense, are offering a route into reading for disadvantaged groups. Persons who as a child were stimulated to read literature by their parents turned out to be more AVID READERS of literary books and their general level was higher in later life. For this reason, libraries should focus on developing e-lending of e-books and digital audiobooks, on using digital channels for public information, and on creating virtual and interactive network services offering educational and cultural contents. The e-books may help students to comprehend texts, stimulate reading fluency, enhance vocabularies and boost reading motivation. Finally, future research will also have to face the challenge of reading as a transmedia phenomenon experienced across various platforms and in multifarious contexts beyond schools or children’s homes. In addition to that, scholars cannot generalise about “effects”, but need to focus on roles, consequences, or influences with regard to some kinds of content, some kind of children and some kinds of conditions. Cap 2: designing digital texts for beginner readers By DESIGN we mean the visual organisation of type and pictures on paper and use screen and by PROCESS the ways in which design is developed to meet the needs of its intended reader group. The LEGIBILITY study for example focuses more on typeface and type size for different elements of a text and use space to make the text easy to read. We can distinguish: - INTRINSIC FEATURES= properties of the characters themselves: typeface or style of letterform, character set, variants pf typeface (es- italic), - EXTRINSIC FEATURES= change the space between or around particular characters, or their colours. define attention as being constituted of three neural networks: alerting, orienting and executive network. While some components of attention develop very early and are relatively matured by the time a child enters formal education, other aspects of attention continue to develop well into middle (7–9 years) and late (10– 12 years) childhood. The executive network is mainly concerned with an individual’s voluntary control of attention, with the main function of resolving interferences when there is a simultaneous activation of correct and incorrect responses. Based on this model it could be suggested that orienting and executive network potentially play a part in success or failure in reading acquisition. With the new technologies the ubiquitous presence of blue, underlined words, used to signal hyperlinks, has more basic attentional implications. The contribution of working memory to skilled reading and to development of reading skills has been shown consistently over several decades. Research has consistently shown that readers – children and adults – with a high working memory span perform better on measures of comprehension than readers with a low working memory span. We return to this issue later when we consider a number of models of reading comprehension. The WORKING MEMORY MODEL of Baddeley is the most widely applied in this field. Baddeley and Hitch’s model comprises four components –phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, episodic buffer and central executive. The first two are considered to be slave systems for short term retention and rehearsal of verbal and visual or spatial material respectively while binding of material is purported to be the main function of the episodic buffer. The central executive manages resources and allocates attention. The functions of updating, inhibition, shifting or switching and cognitive flexibility are commonly associated with the central executive. working memory as applied to reading relies heavily on the updating function. It is generally accepted that the phonological loop does not have an important role in skilled reading, regardless of the medium. In contrast, researchers are beginning to identify a role for the visuo-spatial sketchpad in digital reading. Kintsch’s CONSTRUCTION-INTEGRATION MODEL is one of the most influential theories of comprehension. In this model, three levels of representation are proposed: surface representation, propositional textbase, and situation model. The theorist viewed the comprehension as a process of construction, where a reader combines background knowledge with information presented in the text. Eye-tracking research by Fitzsimmons (2017), for example, has shown that the mere presence of a single-coloured word within a written sentence will reduce the likelihood that the word is skipped (as long as the colour does not have reduced contrast, ex-grey – blue does not appear to reduce contrast. When readers know that a coloured word is explicitly a hyperlink that can be clicked in order to provide more information, gaze fixation times show further attentional modulation. as a process of construction, where a reader combines background knowledge with information presented in the text. A key component of Kintsch’s model is inferencing, an activity which places demands on working memory. As readers progress through text, related knowledge is activated, and the reader needs to make decisions about the extent to which inferences and elaborations should be integrated. Van den Broek et al proposed that activation of specific concepts might result from four potential sources of activation. These are (1) the text currently being read, (2) the text that has just been read, (3) the text read previously, and (4) background knowledge. This is called the LANDSCAPE MODEL. Sub-processes of EXECUTIVE CONTROL that are important for reading include directing cognitive processes, prioritizing, metacognitive monitoring and self- checking, selecting and choosing, and shifting, organising and managing one’s actions and behaviours. Successful comprehension is also thought to depend on higher level executive skills such as reasoning, critical analysis and effort allocation across various sections of the reading task. METACOGNITION is “cognition about cognition”. Metacognition is involved in the monitoring and control of various cognitive activities distinguished between three facets: 1- METACOGNITIVE KNOWLEDGE = the individual’s stored knowledge or beliefs about themselves and others as cognitive agents, about tasks, about actions or strategies, and about how all these interact to affect the outcomes of any enterprise. 2- METACOGNITIVE EXPERIENCES= conscious cognitive or affective experiences that occur during the enterprise. 3- METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES= are used to control cognition in order to achieve a goal. Researchers have established the importance of metacognitive knowledge for reading in children and adults. The better readers appear to have better control of their cognitive activities during reading, and that they seem to engage in more appropriate behaviours such as re-reading, integrating information, planning ahead and making inferences. But for the others there is considerable room for improvement. In fact, following Walcyzk’s COMPENSATORY MODEL, the individuals can engage in two types of activities if they encounter a difficulty while reading: COMPENSATORY BEHAVIOURS •includes pausing and looking back, are fast, fix-up activities which should involve minimal disruption to reading process. COMPENSATORY STRATEGIES •such as re-reading are more time-consuming activities which disrupt the flow of reading and are likely to impact mental representation. We speculate that at least two levels of adaptability might be achievable in the future. At a generic level readers would indicate their preference for text suitable for a particular purpose (ex- reading to entertain, reading for information searching, or reading to evaluate and critique). At a personal level, readers might be able to drive text adaptations through provision of data about their working memory capacity, their tendency to be distracted, etc. CAP 4- COMPREHENSION PROCESSES IN DIGITAL READING The 3 main competences of comprehension processes in digital reading are: 1- NAVIGATION= efficient navigation is essential to handle the vast amount of information available on the Internet and to ensure that readers construct a coherent representation of the issue while avoiding distraction. And becoming lost in cyberspace. The competence involves not only searching and scanning for goal-relevant information, but also sequencing navigation towards relevant information. 2- INTEGRATION= Learners’ comprehension of information presented on different digital information resources will partly rely on their ability to integrate information across various kinds of representations. Such integration is often a demanding task. Readers construct a mental representation of a text based on its lexical and syntactic surface and make inferences based on the text’s coherently related parts. Integration, thus, requires that the reader’s prior knowledge is connected to the new information such that the two become associated in memory. 3- EVALUATION= Readers are required to evaluate information in terms of relevance and trustworthiness. That will help the readers make appropriate metacognitive decisions such as whether or not to process the contests of a website more deeply or to decide which knowledge claims to accept as valid in a discussion in social media. In order to capture the complexity of the different competencies of digital reading researchers need to use advanced methods that allow tracking of students’ text processing while reading. One of these is EYE-TRACKING that continuously tracks the position of the eyes while they move across visual stimuli such as text or pictures presented on web pages. Based on the assumption that what is being fixated by the eyes is being processed in the mind, eye-tracking data is a strong indicator of individuals’ moment-by-moment cognitive processing. It provides insights into cognitive processes at a very fine-grained level. Moreover, it seems NAVIGATION INTEGRATION EVALUATION parts of text they were reading, and also had better memory for important details in text. Emotional states can be transferred to other people without their awareness. This phenomenon is called EMOTIONAL CONTAGION. An interesting finding is that emotional contagion effectively takes place in digital environments. In the future, brain imaging methodologies will offer insights into the nature of the emotional processes occurring during reading. CAP 7- LITERACY EDUCATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE The parents are challenged nowadays to between a more traditional notion of literacy and new literacies. Children brought up in such digital environments often explore the functions of technology without being explicitly taught to use them. Since they are 3 years old, children learn that symbols can represent words, but do not yet have letter knowledge. Thus, this pattern of results shows that interacting with digital tools can support the development of the literacy skills necessary both on screen and in print. Children growing up with picture books use illustrations to understand the meaning of text. They learn that besides the motivations function, illustrations can serve as an additional resource for meaning making, particularly before they have learned to decode. According to the DUAL CODING THEORY, reading illustrated books enables children to connect linguistic and non-linguistic information and develop a more complex representation of the concepts presented in the story. Illustrations provide children with a deeper understanding of the events and the characters of the story as the visual information gives them clues through facial expression, body posture and character actions. Studies have indicated differential benefits and limitations of the use of touch screen technologies in pre-school contexts. These children further benefitted form the increase in the book reading options afforded by e-books and from additional affordances, thus supporting the utility of including both print and digital texts in preschool classrooms. The challenges for teachers when integrating digital technologies into literacy instruction include inadequate technological knowledge, expectations of students’ ease with technology, inappropriate expectations for assignment, and limited conceptions of the purposes of technology. This shift creates a scenario where adults, as reading “experts”, do not necessarily have all the answers yet, in terms of how to best foster the resulting “MULTI-LITERACIES” that children must learn. This reality can create challenges as well as opportunities. CAP 8- READING TO LEARN Online reading is also more complex than traditional print reading. Poor designs may cause confusion, lack of comprehension and boredom. Medium and method are inseparable parts of a successful instructional design. Several instructional design theories have been proposed to support intrinsic meaning and reduce cognitive effort. For instance, DUAL CODING THEORY considers the dual functionality of the human cognition and maintains that images and verbal representations exist in two separate subsystems, which complement each other while facilitating the retention of the information. MAYER describes 3 demands on a learner’s cognitive processing during the process of learning: extraneous processing, essential processing, and generative processing. Much of this learning does involve text reading within a multimedia context. 1- EXTRANEOUS COGNITIVE PROCESSING= processing that does not support the intended learning objective and may be caused by design aspects such as: poor layout, redundancy, signaling, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity. 2- ESSENTIAL PROCESSING= processing needed for the basic act of mentally representing the material being presented in real time. It involves segmenting, pre-training, modality. 3- GENERATIVE PROCESSING= processing which involves taking the material represented, organizing it and integrating it with existing knowledge. It involves personalisation, voice, embodiment, image. Rose and Sherry describe the types of previewing as: oral previewing, silent previewing and listening. On The other hand, generating and answering questions is used as a strategy to ask and answer questions regarding the text they are reading. Higher level questions are found to be facilitative in both productive and reproductive knowledge. While evaluating an argument, a reader determines its value or persuasiveness and judges whether its specific claims are supported by reasons and evidence from the text. Contextualising is the bringing of basic skills and content area instruction closer together to increase proficiency in reading, writing and mathematical skills. Connecting information and providing dynamic links to meaningfully related material is something that digital media can arguably achieve a lot more effectively than traditional print media. Graphic organisers are visual illustrations of verbal statements. Graphic organisers are recommended by educators as a tool to foster critical thinking and improve students’ self-regulation of learning. They can be used before, during, and after reading to recall important information. The use of keywords writing and summarising is used to help readers to understand the content and the structure of the text. This strategy encourages deep understanding. CAP 9- DIGITALISATION OF READING ASSESSMENT Digital testing allows for the assessment of skills important in an increasingly technological world, such as digital competence and screen reading. The transition from the print to the digital mode, however, may affect children’s test performance, as well as how reading is conceptualised and taught in the classroom. Technologies are becoming widespread tools for learning, at least in some parts of the worlds. Another important reason behind the digitalisation process is that the digitalised assessment is becoming less costly than paper- based assessment. Kerr and Symons found that reading on paper was associated with more efficient reading comprehension than reading on screen. Another study conducted by Mangen et al. showed that reading on screen may be particularly adverse for low- performing students. Digitalisation of reading assessments entails a host of implications for test selection, and questions concerning how digital tests present texts of different length are particularly salient. Higher-level cognitive skills involved in certain kinds of inferential reading require texts of appropriate length and complexity that can accommodate items specifically aimed at assessing readers’ ability to read critically. Scrolling the text may require readers to maintain a surface representation of a text and engage in comprehension processes simultaneously. Scrolling can exacerbate the cognitive load, making low-WMC readers particularly vulnerable. Those with lower WMC may have difficulties controlling their visual attention while scrolling and are therefore prone to disorientation and distraction during reading. Finally, when faced with scrolling and lacking aid such as page breaks, low- WMC readers may fail to engage in the consolidation or integration processes necessary for successful comprehension.