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Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / F. Todd Goodson / Historically, advances in technology have impacted education, particularly in the field of literacy. Often, educators initially resist these changes. Today, this is the case with the new literacies. Although students increasingly turn to technology to communicate, school practices still largely ignore this cultural phenomenon. This qualitative study explores the roots of this resistance by examining how teachers negotiate the use of digital literacies in the classroom, particularly in respect to the rhetorical boundaries imposed upon schools by their local culture. Data were collected through 34 interviews with individuals in three demographically different schools districts. Of particular interest were the key literacy decision makers. At the district level, assistant superintendents who also served as secondary curriculum directors, technology directors and literacy coaches were interviewed. The school level focused on middle and high schools, and, in two districts, on alternative education centers. Principals, librarian, lead English teachers and new English teachers, defined as teaching for three years or less, provided information for the study at these schools. During the data analysis, grounded theory, as well as the gap and continuum theories described by Deanna Bogdan (1992a & b), guided the study. When examining what factors create the boundaries educators work within, nine initial themes emerged: infractions, distractions, dependency, immediacy, misinformation, safety, inappropriateness, funding and change. Further examination of the data revealed the central phenomenon: “The technological evolution that occurs outside the classroom must be adapted before it makes its way into pedagogical practice.” This phenomenon provides the first layer for the model. To better understand the adaptation process, the gap and continuum theories were employed, leading to a spectrum between gatekeepers and facilitators. Each of the three districts fit in distinctively different places on this spectrum. Axial coding was then used to further explore the relationship of the themes to the adaptation process. The nine themes could then be collapsed into three categories: perceptions of student behaviors, perceptions of technology, and perception of school’s role in society. This study provides educators insight into the factors that guide their decision-making processes when considering the incorporation of technology into the classroom.

In an age characterized by globalization and mobility, societal dynamics across the world have experienced dramatic changes in terms of cultural and linguistic diversity. The increase in the flows of populations, discourses, and materials has been further accelerated by the technological advances. The new, digital ways that we use to communicate, interact, and manage our social relationships have led researchers to think about new ways of approaching texts, resources, and social interactions. Referring to globalization, deep transformations in society, and resulting sociolinguistic impacts, Coupland (2003) and Blommaert (2003) call for a rethinking of the ways sociolinguistics attempt to address globalization. This call has precipitated various theoretical and methodological suggestions, which have appeared in monographs, journal issues, and edited volumes (e.g., Blommaert, 2010; Coupland, 2010; de Fina & Perrino, 2013; Pennycook, 2010; Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010). However, the study of digital practices at the intersection of heterogeneity and mobility in the age of digital diversity has been minimally addressed (See Androutsopoulos & Juffermans, 2014).In an attempt to shed light on digital activities of multilingual individuals in online participatory spaces, the current study investigates the social networking site (SNS) practices of international graduate students (IGSs) who are experiencing transnational mobility. Theoretically informed by sociolinguistics and new media studies, the current interdisciplinary study analyzes multilingual students' new media literacy (NML) practices, use of semiotic resources, and digital practices of sharing transcultural content in connection with the construction and management of various aspects of their identities in contexts of superdiversity. For this purpose, the collected data, which is triangulated with an online survey, semi-structured interviews, and SNS data, is both quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The findings show that despite having what could be considered' truncated NMLs' (i.e. having different levels of literacies), IGSs successfully interact within participatory spaces. The quantitative and qualitative results indicate that multilingual students frequently engage in linguistic and multimodal practices by mobilizing a great diversity of linguistic and multimodal resources in identity performances. Furthermore, IGSs mediate transcultural content by means of semiotic resources to negotiate their membership in various home country and host country communities. It is concluded that multilingual students form, foster and maintain transnational identities in superdiverse digital contexts by mobilizing their often 'truncated repertoires' (Blommaert, 2010), which may include semiotic tools afforded by SNSs, language resources, and NMLs. This dissertation aims to make a value-added theoretical contribution to the current thinking of online superdiversity; a methodological contribution by employing Social Network Analysis as a data collection and analysis technique; and a pedagogical contribution by proposing that 'SNS Literacies', a set of social practices that are essential for navigation and participation of learners in superdiverse networks, be explicitly addressed within educational contexts.

The new world of academic discourse is complex and necessitates that L1 and L2 graduate students learn a multiplicity of texts, master intertextuality, and actively participate in emerging literacies or genres of their disciplines (Molle & Prior, 2008; Swales, 2004; Warren, 2013). Challenges arise about how doctoral students produce, interpret, and learn texts and genres, and how they act and react around text production in particular multicultural institutional contexts (Hyland, 2000; Prior, 2004). Little is known about how students, particularly those in higher education, establish intertextual connections among different modes of texts (e.g., written, oral, visual) for actively engaging in literacy (Belcher & Hirvela, 2008; Seloni, 2012). The purpose of this study is to examine how L1 and L2 doctoral students use intertextual practices to create meaning and develop their academic literacies during the literacy events of Global Conversations and Literacy Research (GCLR) web seminars. Drawing upon microethnographic discourse analysis, more particularly the constructs of intertextuality (Bloome, & Carter, 2013), I investigate the following questions a) How are the L1 and L2 students engaged in intertextual practices in the literacy events of GCLR web seminars? b) How does the use of intertextuality contribute to L1 and L2 students’ academic literacies? The participants are two L1 and two L2 doctoral students, who are also multilinguals, had different first languages (i.e., Korean, English, Chinese), and actively engaged in the GCLR web seminars. Data drew upon interviews, chat transcriptions, video recordings of the web seminars, and visuals. Data collection and analyses began in September 2014, and continued through November 2015. Microethnographic discourse analysis showed how participants constructed intertextual connections during the literacy events of the GCLR web seminars. The findings show how L1 and L2 doctoral students used intertextuality to socialize into academic discourse, mediate discoursal identities, and develop cultural models. The study has implications for L1 and L2 pedagogy, multilingual’s learning, and research: Future research should investigate academic literacies with intertextual connections to oral, written, and online discourses. Educators and graduate students are encouraged to exploit the full potential of intertextuality through metacognition in emerging academic literacies and mediated discoursal identities.

International Masters students face daunting challenges in adjusting to a startlingly different UK academic discourse within a short time. Little research has been conducted into these challenges and successful transition strategies. A review of learning development literature identified a set of three models, which has not been related theoretically to international Masters students. The latest, critical model, Academic Literacies, especially offers important insights into these students’ difficulties and potential for integration. This research design explored these learning journeys in depth through interviews in a longitudinal study of MBA and MSc students during the 2009-10 academic year. The rich data were investigated through the qualitative methodology of narrative analysis, with twin aims of recognising similarities but also important differences across the students’ learning experiences. A majority experienced strongly emotional learning journeys. These followed an affective pattern with a downturn early in the academic year influenced by the degree of unfamiliarity in the new culture and academic discourse, mirrored by a corresponding improvement in emotional state during Semester 2 or 3 as these external issues became more familiar and comfortable. Self-efficacy emerged as an especially important factor in achieving academic success, and students’ progression was mapped against this variable using an established, U-shaped transition curve model. The study identifies practical learning development interventions, but also highlights the importance of educational practitioners becoming pedagogically self-reflective to empathise more genuinely with international students’ struggles, and to learn from their diverse experiences in ways that can enrich the process of internationalising western education.

The present inquiry is a qualitative case study of conversations and attitudes of students participating in a non-required, second-year conversation section offered as a voluntary adjunct to required second year courses in Italian. The findings in this dissertation support calls by policy makers in foreign language education who advocate for a more integrated and holistic approach to foreign language education. Through this empirical qualitative case study, I have used the construct of Third Space (Gutiérrez, 2008) to examine students’ development of multiple literacies (Swaffar & Arens, 2005) in a foreign language conversation-based classroom. The theory of Third Space is seen as a kind of authentic intersubjective space, where students’ ways of knowing and learning are accepted and expanded in the learning environment. The study describes the results from the implementation of a language pedagogy based on the model of multiple literacies in an Italian conversation class. Students in the class read and viewed a wide variety of authentic materials, around which they anchored their class discussions. Through activities involving multiple readings of the given text, the students co-constructed their interpretations based on personal experiences and on the socio-cultural background of the text. Students also engaged in self-reflective exercises documenting their own learning processes. Through interpretive analysis of student work produced in the class, the ecology of learner developments and the corresponding classroom talk are assessed. I have identified three major themes that are evident as essential elements to the students’ developing trans-linguistic proficiency in conjunction with their evolving cultural literacy. In particular, self-reflection and identity, expanded practices of knowing and learning, and the influence of semiotic mediation on classroom interactions are the three elements that define how these students articulated their Third Space in conjunction with this particular language learning context. / text

The purpose of this study was to explore the process and product of African American First Graders as they participated in digital storytelling. Of interest was the role digital tools played in the creation process. Eight participants participated in 18 study sessions during which they composed, recorded, and then shared their digital texts with their peers and at home. Data sources included classroom observations, parent and teacher questionnaires, participant pre and post interviews, field notes, video and audio tapes of sessions, and story screenshot captures and print outs. Study questions focused on the nature of the texts the student produced, the role of the digital in the creation process, and the meanings and purposes the participants had for the texts they produced. This study’s findings challenge teachers to offer students authentic experiences with writing so that children can construct their own ideas and interests, their own writing personalities. Digital texts were a particularly engaging medium for these young children and allowed them to produce texts that reflected their identities as well as their attitudes toward using digital tools. The nature of the texts varied depending on the child, his or her attitude toward using the digital tools, and likely their previous experiences with composition. One unique type of text was identified as a hybrid text that seemed to capitalize on both the ability of the child storyteller and the affordances of the digital. Due to the study’s emphasis on sharing these texts with peers and at home, the first graders were introduced to a sophisticated view of audience. This transactional role of the audience made them aware of audience as a living, breathing entity that gains ownership of the texts’ meanings once they are shared. / text

Youth experiences with digital technologies demonstrate untapped potential for informing school-based learning responsive to adolescent identity and socialization practices (Ito et al., 2008). This study presents the formation of a collaborative model for appropriating youth and digital practices for developing new literacies with high school students in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands (New London Group, 1996). The research incorporates diversity in technology access and participation of predominately Latino students in English classrooms as a resource to engage literacy development across multiple discursive domains and challenge deficit discourses for Latino youth.The participatory approach combines interventionist research, in the cultural historical tradition of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987) with ethnographic methods for informing curricular practice (González, Moll,&Amanti, 2005; Lee, 2007) and new literacies pedagogy stressing collaborative, critical, and multimodal semiosis infused with Freirian praxis (Coiro et al., 2008; Freire, 1999; Lemke, 2003). Research involved co-developing, co-teaching and daily participant observation within the multiple online and offline spaces of a high school writing course, a weekly after school club begun with students from the class and several additional classrooms. A variety of data illustrates tensions and synergies of migrating practices across systems of activity represented by teacher, researcher and student standpoints. The research maps how socio-spatial relationships among academic and youth discourses, modalities, and participants' classroom positions were reconfigured through the use of digital tools joined with pedagogies responsive to adolescents' social and digital practices.An afterschool group's wiki participation extended students' oral and visual literacies into written expression and gave other participants a model of collaborative practice to guide classroom interaction. Engaging familiar and new tools for inquiries based on youth interests and complementary analytical concepts emphasized the primacy of the social and pedagogical aspects of technology. Students' agency in theorizing identity and developing representational spaces (Lefebvre, 1991) emerged as a key mediator for expanding their literacies across personal and academic contexts. In the collaborative process, participants forged new, hybrid genres, audiences and identities for distributing and developing their literacy practices across false dichotomies of home/school and online/offline spaces, and for reconfiguring normative school literacy regimes.

This thesis is an ethnographically grounded description and interpretation of a variety of writing practices observable in an Arabic speaking community, primarily on the Internet. Working with, or in reaction to, the concept of diglossia, of which Arabic sociolinguistic setting is often cited as a textbook example, the majority of scholars have focused their attention on speech as a major site of language variation and mixing. Writing has been largely neglected. This thesis is a contribution to what I hope will become a growing number of works aimed at filling that lacuna. I examine linguistic features of a number of, mostly non-literary, texts in contemporary Egypt where Modern Standard Arabic (Fuṣḥa) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ˤAmmiyya) constitute the theoretical poles of the diglossic continuum. The Egyptian sociolinguistic setting, however, is here understood as being defined and reconfigured by the increasing socio‑economic importance of yet another linguistic variety – English. The analysis of linguistic details is conducted with reference to a broader socio‑cultural context and local language ideologies surrounding the production and reception of a rapidly growing number of texts that employ a variety of features and draw on different linguistic resources, thus often defying, in the outcome, the hegemonic ideological projection that writing is the domain of Fuṣḥa. In order to offer an account of a dynamic, changing and diversified character of writing practices in present‑day Egypt, illustrative examples are drawn from a number of different texts and domains of writing, including Wikipedia Masry, Twitter, Facebook, advertisements, online campaigns for political and social causes, as well as books. The inventory of linguistic resources variously employed by various writers in various circumstances is identified to contain re-combinations across three linguistic varieties, Fuṣḥa, ˤAmmiyya and English, and two scripts, Arabic and Latin.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Christy Craft / The increasingly integrated presence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on university campuses in recent decades has prompted calls for a better understanding of how students use ICTs in higher education, including the transition to college. While research indicates that students with higher self-efficacy are more likely to persist in college, current research makes few connections between students’ self-efficacy with ICTs and persistence. Additionally, researchers in the area of student retention call for educators to understand how their students perceive the college’s cultural environment so as to help students fit in at an institution and persist. Exploration of ICTs as part of a student’s social, academic, and cultural experiences at the university offers educators and administrators the possibility of modifying the college’s cultural properties in response to student needs. This qualitative study investigated first-year college students and their use of technologies to address the following research question: How do first-year college students perceive their experiences using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the higher education environment? Employing interviews and a phenomenological approach, this study explored the experiences of 19 undergraduate students. Six faculty members or instructors were interviewed about their teaching experiences with first-year students and the extent to which ICTs were incorporated in those experiences in order to provide triangulation of data. Through the analysis of interview transcripts and open coding, three themes emerged regarding how students experience ICTs in higher education. Statements from students and faculty suggest that students experienced ICTs in higher education as: a process of academic integration; situations for which they held internal or external loci of control when using them for academic purposes; and tools to use when becoming socially integrated into the university. The findings of this study have the potential to assist university faculty, instructors, and other staff who are designing courses and services for first-year students. First, the study’s findings indicate that instructors need to be as explicit as possible with their expectations of student use of technology. When students are expected to demonstrate certain behaviors with ICTs those behaviors should be both supported and modeled by faculty and instructors. Secondly, when using ICTs for academic purposes, faculty can help students feel more responsible for their learning by providing them with opportunities to make decisions about how ICTs are used or to incorporate their own problem-solving or learning techniques with ICTs when completing coursework. Finally, faculty, instructors, and other staff should be aware that when first-year students are using ICTs socially, they are trying to create and maintain in-person relationships. Faculty, instructors, and other staff can guide first-year students to events and resources that will help them meet people and locate a social group in which they feel like they fit in.