Teaching and Learning New Literacies

1. Teaching and Learning New Literacies BEd Language Education Year 4 Faculty of Education, HKU

2. Course Aims • What is literacy? • What are the principles and practices of New Literacies or Multiliteracies? • What are the implications of New Literacies for Hong Kong schools and classrooms? • What do New Literacies curriculum materials and teaching practices look like and how can they be implemented in your teaching?

3. Exploring Literacy DISCUSS: How would you define literacy?

4. Exploring Literacy What kinds of literacy activities or literacy practices do you engage in? For each literacy practice you identify, what is the purpose and the context for the practice? What tools, medium or technologies do you use?

5. Exploring literacy

6. Exploring Literacy How have your literacy practices changed over the past 5-10 years?

7. Exploring Literacy • Social orientations to literacy: the New Literacy Studies (Gee 1996, Street 1995 and others) • Literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill • Literacy is embedded in Discourses, ie socially recognised ways of using language, thinking and acting in the world (Gee,1996) • Literacy vs Literacies …. • Multiliteracies, New Literacies

8. Exploring New Literacies through texts Text 1 Text 2 Text 3 http://nohomers.net/showthread.php?t=67084 http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/?scrollerId=bert http://funkatron.com/bert/bert.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/south_asia/1594600.stm http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/bert.htm

9. The multi in multiliteracies Multiple media • paper • electronic • live

10. The multi in multiliteracies Multimodality:multiple systems of meaning making in dynamic interaction with each other • Linguistic (oral and written language, vocabulary, grammar) • Visual (still and moving images) • Auditory (music, sound) • Gestural (facial and body language, movement, stillness) • Spatial (layout and organization of objects and space) after Anstey and Bull 2006:25

11. The multi in multiliteracies Intertextuality • using aspects of other texts (e.g. format, structure, words, music, scenes, Discourses) Texts are consciously constructed • within and across Discourses (Gee,1996) • for/by particular interpretive communities (Wallace, 2003)

12. The multi in multiliteracies ‘Reading’ processes: • Nonlinear and interactive paths through texts • Constant problem solving, reflection and comparison, recall, and hypothesizing • Active construction of meaning by user • Working with multiple and multilayered meanings • Contesting, challenging, resisting roles and messages in texts

13. The “multi” in multiliteracies ‘Writing’ processes: Indeed there is no text paradigm. Text types are subject to wholesale experimentation, hybridization, and rule breaking. Conventional social relations associated with roles of author/authority and expert have broken down radically under the move from “publishing” to participation, from centralized authority to mass collaboration, and the like. (Lankshear and Knobel 2006:52)

14. The New in New Literaciesafter Lankshear and Knobel, 2006:38 and 60

15. Being multiliterate in the 21st Century A multiliterate person can… • interpret, use, and create texts • in multimodal representational forms • for a range of purposes in socially and culturally diverse contexts • in informed and socially responsible ways

16. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social FuturesNew London Group, 2000; Anstey & Bull, 2006 • What counts and literacy in the 21st century? • How should literacy teaching respond to the rapid change to our everyday lives as a result of globalization, new communications technologies, and social diversity? • How can students actively participate in and influence their social futures, ie to be designers of their social futures?

17. New Literacies and English language education Obligation to ESL/EFL learners, for whom learning English means access to social and cultural capital in a global economy • to help them become strategic, responsive and critical users/producers of texts • to heighten curricular relevance and nurture motivation • to support the learning of a second language and conventional print literacy

18. http://newliteracieshongkong.wikispaces.com

19. References Anstey, M, & Bull, G. (2006) Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies. International Reading Association and Australian Literacy Educator’s Association. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2006) New literacies: Everyday practices & classroom learning. (2nd Ed). NY: Open University Press, McGraw-Hill Street, B. (1995). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. Harlow: Longman. The New London Group (2000) ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures’ in B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, eds. Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge, pp.9-38 Wallace, C. (2003) Critical reading in language education. Palgrave Macmillan