Teaching for Global Literacy
Professor Mark Warschauer will deliver, via videoconference, a keynote plenary address to the 48th annual national convention of the Japan Association of College English Teachers on September 4, 2009. The address is entitled "Teaching for Global Literacy."
Abstract
In 2000, the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century identified as one of Japan’s major challenges the teaching and learning of “global literacy,” the components of which it described as (1) “computers and the Internet;” (2) “the mastery of English as the international lingua franca;” and (3) “communication skills---encompassing the ability to express oneself in two-way exchanges, particularly debates and dialogues involving multiple participants on each side, along with clarity in the exposition of ideas, richness of content, and persuasiveness.”
This presentation discusses the construct of global literacy and explores three online media to promote it: computer-mediated conversation, blogs, and wikis.
Computer-mediated conversation is one of the oldest yet still most valuable tools of network-based language teaching, as it puts learners in direct contact with others for authentic communication. Drawing on research in the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere, we review the diverse technologies deployed for computer-mediated exchange and dialogue, from email, synchronous chat, online forums, voice-based exchanges, and videoconferencing, as well as the different contexts of use (among individuals or groups, within or across classes, within or across borders, among English learners or between learners and native speakers, etc.). The advantages and disadvantages of particular approaches, as well as practical suggestions for success, will be reviewed.
The second major tool reviewed will be blogs. The blog search engine, Technorati, is tracking some 150 million blogs around the world, with Japan one of the world’s major sites for blogging (Warschauer, Black, & Chou, in press). Though there is considerable variation within blogs, Herring has characterized blogs as fulfilling a “bridging genre,” between the permanence of traditional webpages and the highly interactive and decentered communication of e-mail or online forums (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, S., & Wright, 2005). Blogs thus offer a form of public authorship that is not ordinarily achieved through email or online discussion, but with a degree of interactivity not found in ordinary web pages.
Analysis of both public and classroom blogs (see, e.g., Bloch, 2007) reveals their affordances for second language writing instruction. The hybrid nature of blogs allows them to similarly serve as a bridge between informal communication and academic writing, as authors express their ideas and receive feedback from a community of peers or interlocutors, appropriate the words and expressions of others in a safe way, and sharpen their communication in response to the reactions and responses of a social audience. At their best, blogs can help fulfill the dialogic vision of Bakhtin, who viewed language as “a continuous generative process implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers" (Volosinov, 1929, p. 98). Prior research on blogs, and suggestions for their use in language teaching, will be discussed.
If blogs have elevated the role of authorship, wikis have, in a sense, eliminated it, by submerging the individual writer within a collective editorial process and product. The potential of wikis for writing instruction is suggested by the inventor of the medium, Ward Cunningham, who commented, “The blogosphere is a community that might produce a work, whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community” (Warschauer & Grimes, 2007). Wikis thus fulfill the vision of social constructionists, who see learning to write as entering a discourse community and mastering its conventions. In writing for a wiki, a student enters into a community and participates legitimately in shaping its product, though subject to the direct editing of more experienced members of the community. Flexible wiki tools allow this process to take place at the classroom level, among English learners internationally, or among a broader community of English speakers.
New types of hardware and software can help make computer-mediated learning more widespread, from low-cost “netbooks” (highly portable laptops designed for Internet access, word processing, and other essential computing tasks), to “smartbooks” (even lower-cost machines that match the form factor of laptops with the processing chips of cellphones), to open source operating systems and software. The emergence of these devices mean that teaching for global literacy—whether through computer-mediated conversation, blogs, wikis, or other tools—is more possible than ever before.
