Novos letramentos

The New Literacies: Research on Reading Instruction with the Internet and Other Digital Technologies
 

© International Reading Association
 

Donald J. Leu, Jr.
Syracuse University

To appear in:

S. J. Samuels and A. E. Farstrup (Eds.) What research has to say about reading instruction.  Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
 
 

Abstract

New forms of reading and writing are emerging as the Internet and other new technologies for literacy enter our classrooms.  This chapter shows how teachers are helping children around the world develop these new literacies with Internet technologies.  It also explores the nature of these new literacies that build upon traditional reading and writing experiences and explains why these new literacies are central to our children's future.   It suggests we must begin to include the literacies associated with the Internet in a broader definition of what it means to become literate.

 The New Literacies: Research on Reading Instruction with the Internet and Other Digital Technologies

The essence of both reading and reading instruction has always been change.  Reading a book changes us forever; we return from the worlds we inhabit during our reading journeys with new insights about ourselves and our surroundings.  Teaching a child to read is also a transforming experience; it opens up new windows to the world, creating a lifetime of opportunities for that child.  Change has always defined our work as literacy educators.  By teaching a child to read, we change the world.

Today, reading and reading instruction are being defined by change in even more profound ways. New forms of information and communication technology (ICT) such as the Internet are rapidly generating new literacies required to effectively exploit their potentials (Eagleton, 1999; Karchmer, 1999; Meyer & Rose, 1998; Reinking, McKenna, Labbo, & Kieffer, 1998; Topping, 1997; Warschauer, 1999; Wood, 1999). These technologies also make possible new instructional practices to help children acquire the literacies of their future.  Traditional definitions of reading instruction will be insufficient if we seek to provide children with the futures they deserve.

The changes experienced by many students who graduate from secondary school this year teach us an important lesson about our literacy future.  Many graduates started their school career with the literacies of paper, pencil, and book technologies but finish having encountered the literacies demanded by a wide variety of digital information technologies: word processors, CD-ROMs, WWW browsers, web-based editors, email, and many others.  These students experienced new literacies at the end of their schooling unimagined at the beginning. Given the increasingly rapid pace of change in the technologies of literacy, it is likely that students who begin school this year will experience even more profound changes during their own literacy journeys. Moreover, this story will be repeated again and again as new generations of students encounter yet unimagined technologies of information and communication as they move through school and develop yet unimagined literacies.

We can see the beginning of these changes in the unprecedented rate at which the Internet is entering school classrooms around the world.  Consider the example of the US: in 1994 only 3% of K-12 classrooms in the US had a computer connected to the Internet; in 1998, 51% of classrooms had an Internet computer; and it is expected that nearly every classroom will have an Internet computer by 2000 (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999). Similar changes are taking place in the UK, Ireland, Finland, Australia, New Zealand and other countries (Leu & Kinzer, in press). By any measure, this is unprecedented change; never before have we seen such a rapid infusion of such a powerful technology for teaching and learning into the classroom.  The Internet has entered our classrooms faster than books, television, computers, the telephone, or any other technology for information and communication.  Moreover, the Internet will be the vehicle for a host of new technologies that will continue to enter the classroom, regularly requiring new literacies from all of us.
 
 

Exploring New Literacies on the Internet

You may view evidence of the new literacies being developed in schools around the world by visiting IRA's outstanding electronic journal, Reading Online (Available at: http://www. readingonline.org).  You might also use the Internet to visit the many classrooms where profound changes are taking place in the nature of reading and writing.  These teachers share important lessons about the new literacies.

Some of the new literacies emerge from project-based learning experiences with Internet technologies. You can see these by visiting Marjorie Duby and her fifth grade studentsSusan Silverman's classroom in Port Jefferson, New York (http://www.kids-learn.org/). Susan supports research projects for children, invites classrooms to contribute their results, and then posts the work from these classrooms at her site, developing an important resource for still other classrooms to use.  You may also see these new forms of literacy in space science projects, such as "Women in Space," available through NASA (http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/interactive/index.html#archives) where classrooms collaborate with scientists in all parts of the world as they explore important scientific questions. (http://lee.boston.k12.ma.us/d4/trav/lroot.html) at the Joseph Lee School in Boston, Massachusetts to see this taking place. Marjorie is one of the most accomplished developers of travel buddy projects, collaborative Internet projects based on stuffed animals that travel from classroom to classroom sparking reading and writing experiences via the Internet.  You might also visit

Figure 1. Stellaluna's Friends: An example of a project site developed by Susan Silverman and her students (http://www.kids-learn.org/)

The new literacies of cross-cultural understanding also emerge as the Internet enters our classrooms. You can see these by visiting the Hobart - Malang Electronic Mail Project developed between students in Tasmania and Indonesia by Peter Lelong, Ibu Wahyuni, and others (http://www.fahan.tas.edu.au//Compute/indo.html).  Or, visit Book Raps (http://rite.ed.qut.edu.au/oz-teachernet/projects/book-rap/index.html) the location managed by Cherrol McGhee, a teacher at the Hillview State Primary School in Queensland, Australia.  Here children from around the world engage in literature discussion groups about common works of literature they have read, exchanging insights about the world from a variety of cultural perspectives. Or, visit the location developed by Cheryl Cox: Cinco de Mayo (http://www.zianet.com/hatchelementary/Cinco.html). This is another example of how the Internet may be used to develop broader cultural understandings through new forms of reading and writing.

You might also explore the new literacies of video conferencing by visiting the sites developed by of Hazel Jobe, a former Title I Reading/Language Arts teacher at Marshall Elementary School in Lewisburg, Tennessee (http://www.marshall-es.marshall.k12.tn.us/jobe/vcsuggest.html and http://www.marshall-es.marshall.k12.tn.us/jobe/Read-Write/environment/adventures.html).  Hazel and her students use this emerging technology to interview scientists about the natural world.  They also exchange the results of their study in videoconferences with classrooms around the world.

Finally, you might also visit Room 100 at Buckman Elementary School in Portland, Oregon (http://buckman.pps.k12.or.us/room100/room100.html) to see the new literacies possible for younger children to achieve. Beth Rohloff and Tim Lauer publish their K-2 students’ amazing work on their classroom home page, making it available to other primary grade classrooms around the world.  All of these examples from the Internet, and many more, represent fundamental changes taking place in the nature of reading, writing, and literacy education.
 

What Are the New Literacies?

The new literacies include the skills, strategies, and insights necessary to successfully exploit the rapidly changing information and communication technologies that continuously emerge in our world.  A more precise definition of the new literacies may never be possible to achieve since their most important characteristic is that they regularly change; as new technologies for information and communication continually appear, new literacies emerge (Bruce, 1997; Leu, in press a; Reinking, 1998).  Moreover, these changes often take place faster than we are able to completely evaluate them. Regular change is a defining characteristic of the new literacies.

This simple observation has profound consequences for literacy and literacy education. The continuously changing technologies of literacy mean that we must help children learn how to learn new technologies of literacy. In fact, the ability to learn continuously changing technologies for literacy may be a more critical target than learning any particular technology of literacy itself.

A second aspect of the new literacies is that they are increasingly dependent upon the ability to critically evaluate information.  Open networks, such as the Internet, permit anyone to publish anything; this is one of the opportunities this technology presents.  It is also one of its limitations; information is much more widely available from people who have strong political, economic, religious, or ideological stances that profoundly influence the nature of the information they present to others. As a result, we must assist students to become more critical consumers of the information they encounter (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Muspratt, Freebody, & Luke, 1996). Such skills have not always been important in classrooms where textbooks and other traditional information resources are often assumed to be correct.

A third aspect of the new literacies is that they include the new forms of strategic knowledge necessary to locate, evaluate, and effectively use the extensive resources available within complexly networked ICT such as the Internet. The extent and complexity of this information is staggering.  Moreover, these already extensive resources increase each day as new computers are connected to networks and as people create new information and publish it for others to use. The extensive information networks of ICT require new forms of strategic knowledge in order to exploit them effectively. How do we best search for information in these complex worlds? How do we design a web page to be useful to people who are likely to visit?  How do we communicate effectively with videoconference technologies?  Strategic knowledge is central to the new literacies.

A fourth aspect of the new literacies is that they are highly social; they require even greater social learning strategies compared to traditional literacies.  Literacy has always been a social phenomenon but the new literacies contain even more of a social component than traditional literacies. The technologies of literacy change too quickly and are too extensive to for us to be literate in them all.  Each of us, however, will know something useful to others. Reading an instructional manual for a new technology, for example, is often less efficient than simply asking another student who is familiar with the software.  Social learning strategies, such as knowing who knows what type of information and how to quickly exchange it, become essential when literacy technologies rapidly change.

Social learning strategies also become important because networked technologies for literacy permit us to communicate much more extensively with people around the world.  Much of the new information that becomes available on the Internet resides in the people who inhabit it, not in isolated texts.  In order to access this type of information, we must develop new social components to our literacy skills.  Teachers who engage their classes in collaborative projects with other children around the world are preparing them in important ways for their future with networked ICT.

A fifth aspect of these new literacies is that they provide special opportunities to help us better understand the unique qualities in each of our cultural traditions. The new literacies allow our students to immediately communicate with others around the world from different cultural contexts and, in that communication, develop new understandings about the many different ways of knowing that exist in this world.  The extent of this opportunity has never before existed in school classrooms. The new literacies enable us to develop more complex, richer, and more powerful definitions of multicultural education, helping us to better understand the diverse nature of our global society (Leu, 1997b).

Finally, it is important to recognize that the new literacies build upon, they do not usually replace previous literacies.  Traditional elements of literacy will continue to be important within the new literacies.  In fact, it could be argued that they will become even more essential.  The ability to read text will become more important because it allows us to access information faster than listening, and speed counts in rich, complexly networked information environments. The ability to write text will become more important because written text can be easily stored and organized to generate new knowledge.  While reading and writing abilities become more important in the new literacies they will also change in important ways (Eagleton, 1999).  Reading and writing will take new forms as text is combined with new media resources and linked within complex information networks requiring new literacies for their effective use.
 

Why Are the New Literacies Important?

Not everyone is sanguine about the consequences of new technologies for education.  In fact, a number of critics raise important concerns about rushing to embrace these new technologies in the classroom (Birkerts, 1994; Cuban, 1986; Healy, 1998; Oppenheimer, 1997; Rochlin, 1997; Roszak, 1994; Stoll, 1995). Most of their arguments focus on the lack of teacher preparation, the inappropriate use of technology in the classroom, and the relative cost of technology in comparison to other educational needs; they do not demonstrate hard data on the inability of new technologies to support learning and higher achievement.

While there is limited evidence that computer technologies do produce learning gains (PCAST, 1997; Follansbee, Hughes, Pisha, & Stahl, 1997; Kulik & Kulik, 1991; Kulik, Kulik & Bangert-Drowns, 1990), arguments over efficacy issues may be moot in a world where new technologies change at a rate that exceeds our ability to comprehensively evaluate their potential for literacy and learning in the classroom (Leu, in press a; Leu & Kinzer, in press).

Efficacy studies may also be less useful if one recognizes that literacy in one context may not be identical to literacy in a different context.  How, for example, should one compare comprehension within a traditional text and a rich and complexly networked information resource such as the Internet where each user may take a completely different path and acquire different information about a subject?  Moreover, new aspects of meaning construction become far more important in complexly networked information resources such as the Internet.  Speed, for example, becomes far more important.  So, too, does the ability to locate useful resources and critically evaluate their utility in relation to the task demands.  Locating useful resources quickly becomes just as important as comprehending those resources.

 Perhaps simple observation about the changing nature of literacy provides more powerful data than any set of efficacy studies.  If, for example, one concludes that networked ICTs have become central to success in the workplace or in higher education, why should we waste valuable time and energy demonstrating their efficacy over earlier technologies?  To do so means an extensive research effort to demonstrate the obvious.

 Many argue we have entered a historical period where it is no longer land, labor, or capital that defines one’s life opportunities in an information age (Bruce, 1997; Mikulecky & Kirkley, 1998; 1999; Reich, 1992; Rifkin, 1995). They note that work is increasingly characterized by the effective use of information resources to solve important problems within a globally competitive economy. Since networked, digital technologies provide greater and more rapid access to larger amounts of information, the effective use of information skills such as reading and writing become even more important in competitive workplace contexts (Gilster, 1997; Harrison & Stephen, 1996).  As a result, reading comprehension, problem solving, information access, and communication are essential to success. The Internet and other networked technologies will be increasingly important to enable individuals to access the best information in the shortest time as they solve important problems

 This is what a number of nations have concluded including Australia, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Finland, New Zealand, the US, and many others.  Recognizing the importance of preparing citizens to compete in a global information economy, these countries have recently launched educational initiatives that will lead to a convergence of literacy instruction and the Internet (Leu & Kinzer, in press).

 The similarity in public policy initiatives around the world is startling.  While each country is responding to the educational challenges of global competition in a distinctive fashion, nearly every nation is articulating higher standards or benchmarks for literacy, is testing on an annual basis to monitor progress, and is supporting schools with the enormous expense of infusing Internet technologies into the curriculum.  You may see evidence of this important work at the Internet locations developed in many of these countries to support educators, parents, and children:

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