This thesis presents a case study from an authentic school practice, where seven students, in their second year of a social sciences program in an upper secondary school, use internet texts in various learning situations. The aim of the study is to map the reading practices of students encountering internet texts. The main data consists of observations, audio and screen recordings, written instructions, and screen shots of the sites visited. Reading practices are analysed, drawing on concepts from New Literacy Studies and Systemic Functional Grammar, including literacy events, literacy in terms of text culture, textual norms, abstraction, authority and modality as a scale of reliability. The results reveal that meaning making resources such as colours, amount of writing and images and choice of fonts all seem to be parts of students’ conceptions of reliability. These textual norms result in learning situations in which students search for texts with predominantly dense writing promoting encyclopaedic knowledge. These highly authoritative texts can be hard to understand for the students, something that the text analyses indicate. In comparison to text books, the internet texts used show, a higher level of authority and abstraction, reinforced by grammatical metaphors. Most situations in the study include peer interaction, but the most obvious learning potential resides in situations with a clear reading goal, where students work in groups and where negotiation is part of the meaning making process. The pedagogical implications of the study suggest the potential for students to achieve a higher degree of understanding of the encountered internet texts, through group work, and discussions concerning the impact of different layouts and the demands of verbal language. Another potential concerns methods for avoiding critical literacy being reduced to trivial visual scanning, via discussions focusing on criteria for reliability evaluations. It is suggested that increased teacher awareness concerning the types of internet texts the students will encounter in authentic situations may contribute to students’ field and genre insight.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-55499 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Nemeth, Ulrika |
| Publisher | Institutionen för språkdidaktik, Stockholm : Institutionen för språkdidaktik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Licentiate thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Studier i språkdidaktik – Studies in Language Education ; 7 |
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