• Home
• Literacy Research Discussion Group
• Members
• Research and Publications
• Resource Centre

LRDG meetings held in 2010

12 January 2010

Chris Parson - Lecturer in basic adult education, Faculty of Psychology and Education, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Adult Literacy and empowerment - from stocktaking to power-sharing

From 2005 to 2008, seven voluntary bodies actively involved in adult basic education provision from 5 European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Spanish Basque Country, Switzerland) worked together on a UE ( Grundtvig 2 ) funded project to explore the emancipatory dimensions of adult literacy work in Europe. At the outset, the project partners identified the following main area of activity:

•  Exchange, mutualisation and critical assessment between active partners in the field of adult literacy in Europe of Tools, methods, practices and methodological processes fostering autonomy, individual and collective empowerment in adult literacy work.

The project aimed at strengthening the emancipatory dimensions of pedagogical practices involving adult learners and more generally for their roles as citizens in the countries in which the now lived. The group was composed of learners, tutors and managers and two weekly meetings per year were scheduled in the partner countries, with five meetings taking place from November 2005 to May 2008.

Exchanges were to centre on existing empowerment practices, which had been tried and adopted by partners, in order to increase complementarities and enrich pedagogical approaches. It was thought that these exchanges would allow the establishment of an inventory of empowerment pedagogical practices in the field of adult literacy training.

In concrete terms, this involved:

•  The learning of an oral language (in general, that of the host country)

•  Reading and writing practices as developed in the ECLER* workshops

•  The participative process of individual and collective emancipation, as developed in the REFLECT-ACTION approach

The REFLECT participative methodology, largely inspired by the work of Paulo Freire, was soon adopted as the working model for all meetings and shifted emphasis from the establishment of inventories of best practice to an ongoing analysis of what was actually happening in terms of power distribution and active participation within the group as it progressed. Not all learners had the same expectations in terms of power sharing and outcomes and it soon became evident that the process itself was becoming the focal point of the partnership.

How did this change come about, and how did it lead to a joint decision to work on a manifesto for learning ("Freedom to learn - learning for freedom") and the shooting of a short film about the participatory process itself?

* Ecire Communiquer Lire Echanger Réflechir - a participative approach to adult literacy developed in France by Noel Ferrand, centered on the learner's own written production.

26 January 2010

Candice Satchwell, Lancaster Literacy Research Centre

Carbon literacy practices: textual footprints between school and home

How do children make sense of climate change? Although climate change is not a designated topic in the national curriculum in primary school, children are open to numerous messages about the subject, both in and out of school. At the same time, children are often constructed as 'agents of change' in relation to environmental issues. This project attempts to expand and redefine the notion of 'carbon literacy' by studying the literacy practices of children in relation to climate change, and in relation to their families and communities. The pilot study which I will discuss has used a variety of ethnographic methods to understand ways in which children construct knowledge about climate change, including observations, focus groups and interviews. I have also piloted a method of 'tracking' children's literacy practices outside of school by using mobile phones and Twitter to convey messages amongst a group of children and a researcher, leading to the joint construction of narratives.

2 February 2010 -- MULTIMODALITIES SEMINAR

Discussion chaired by Julia Gillen, Lancaster Literacy Research Centre

Launch of our Multimodality theme

Over the next two terms, supported by Faculty funding, we are organising several of our meetings around the theme of multimodality, including an exciting programme of external speakers. At this session we will introduce the theme, including through a brief DVD presentation of Sigrid Norris introducing her approach to the analysis of multimodality. The paper we will discuss has been recently published:

Flewitt, R., Hampel, R., Hauck, M. & Lancaster, L. (2009) What are multimodal data and transcription? In C. Jewitt, (ed). The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. pp. 40-53.

9 February 2010

Nathalie Joly and Laura Sayre, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Dijon

and Jean-Marc Weller, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Farmers Facing Traceability: A case-study approach from Burgundy, France

It is widely recognized, both within and beyond farming communities, that paperwork levels have increased for farmers in recent decades, as government agencies and private certification bodies alike seek to reassure anxious consumers about the integrity of their food supply.  But how exactly have recordkeeping practices in agriculture changed over time?  What are the formal and functional differences between internal (produced on the farm, for the farm) and external (produced by and for others) documentary requirements?  Is paperwork purely burdensome, or is it mixed in its effects?  This presentation will report preliminary results from a projected two-year study of recordkeeping practices among farmers in Burgundy and Lancashire as they relate to new and existing demands for traceability in agriculture.  

16 February 2010

Barbara Comber, University of South Australia

Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers' work: An institutional ethnography

My broad project as a researcher has been to document the complex work teachers do in schools situated in low socio-economic areas. In particular I have described how they work with children to make meaning through innovative critical literacy curriculum incorporating the arts and multi-media to represent themselves and their places. My passion has been to capture school-situated literacies which are enabling and to this end I have studied teachers who conjure 'spaces of freedom' in pursuing a social justice agenda. In the context of a seemingly global preoccupation with standard measures of literacy performance, my colleagues and I are currently investigating mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers' work in South Australia, Victoria and Ontario, Canada through an institutional ethnography approach (Griffith & Smith, 2005; Smith, 1987, 2005). In this presentation I will briefly review key insights from my work with teachers in high poverty schools about enabling literacy pedagogies before turning to the current study.

Barbara Comber is a key researcher in the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures in the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia. She has recently co-edited 2 books Literacies in place: Teaching environmental communication (Comber, Nixon & Reid, 2007) and Turn-around pedagogies: Literacy interventions for at-risk students (Comber & Kamler, 2005).

23 February 2010

Multimodality - data session

Everyone is asked to bring a piece of multimodal data you find interesting. Each person can spend up to five minutes explaining why it is relevant to their research and what problems or issues it raises. Or simply explain the context in which you found or constructed it and let others develop from that. The plan is to share some useful ideas in a constructive and supportive atmosphere. We will begin to explore some of the issues and challenges that will arise again during our multimodality themed talks ahead over the Spring.

2 March 2010

Angela Brzeski

Collaborative literacy practices of the FE college student:  a study of the relationship between the  home and the classroom domains

The collaborative nature of literacy practices within the home domain has been well documented over the years. But what about the literacy practices within the FE college classroom? How far are these collaborative? Who does the college student collaborate with in their classroom literacy practices and for what purpose? Most importantly for this particular study, does a collaborative approach enhance engagement and, consequently, learning in the classroom? What are the links between college and home in terms of collaborative practices?

This study aims to examine the notions of 'collaboration' and 'engagement' by focussing on the literacy practices of Further Education students both in the home and the classroom domains. The study which I will discuss has used a variety of ethnographic methods to understand the ways students collaborate at home and in the classroom, including observations, photographs and interviews. My study predominately draws upon literacy research theory but is also informed by some educational research perspectives.

9 March 2010

Jèssica Pérez, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and visiting researcher, University of Exeter

Dr Susan Young, University of Exeter

Using a wiki to underpin research: an international project about children's everyday musical activity

The MyPlace, MyMusic Project is exploring everyday musical experience in the home among seven-year-olds in diverse international locations. It is being undertaken by a collaborative team of researchers connected through the ISME Early Childhood Music Education commission. Each researcher has visited one or two seven-year-olds at home to collect information about their everyday musical activities and experiences in the form of videos, photos, documents and audio-recordings and is contributing their data to a shared, common data bank.

The data has been assembled using a wiki so that the researchers have access to the collective data, - and can edit, modify and remove pages. At the moment, data is still being assembled but our aim is that the wiki will not only provide a common access point for sharing the data, but will also contribute to shared dialogue leading to project-wide interpretations as well as identifying areas of interest that members of the research team may pursue individually. Although the project is in its early days, we are interested to hypothesise about the changes to research process that the wiki has the potential bring about.

In this presentation we will explain the aims and methods of the study, explain processes in setting up the wiki and present some of our early-days ideas, both about seven-year-olds' musical experiences at home and about the processes of research enabled by a wiki, illustrating the talk with examples.

International Society of Music Education

16 March 2010

Multimodality - data session

Chair: Julia Gillen

Everyone is asked to bring a piece of multimodal data you find interesting. Each person can spend up to five minutes explaining why it is relevant to their research and what problems or issues it raises. Or simply explain the context in which you found or constructed it and let others develop from that. The plan is to share some useful ideas in a constructive and supportive atmosphere. We will begin to explore some of the issues and challenges that will arise again during our multimodality themed talks ahead over the Spring.

20 April 2010

Amy Burgess

I don't want to be a China buff" : Issues of Writer Identity Across Timescales

In this presentation we will use the example of an adult literacy student producing and talking about a piece of writing on China to illustrate our work on mapping aspects of writer identity onto timescales. We will present a framework for investigating the discoursal construction of writer identity which develops the categories proposed by Ivanic (1998, 2006) in two ways. Firstly, we distinguish aspects of writer identity according to the timescales over which they develop; secondly, we propose interrelationships among the different aspects. We will demonstrate the relevance of this framework for understanding how identity is constructed and changed through acts of writing by using it to interpret data drawn from a study of writing in adult literacy education in England. The example we will discuss shows how different aspects of writer identity and different timescales come into play during one act of writing.

References

Ivanic, R. (1998) Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ivanic, R. (2006) 'Language, learning and identification' . In R. Kiely, P. Rea-Dickens, H. Woodfield and G. Clibbon (eds) Language, Culture and Identity in Applied Linguistics . Equinox.

21 April 2010 -- MULTIMODALITIES SEMINAR

SPECIAL MEETING - 4pm on Wednesday 21 April

CANCELLED - ADAM JAWORSKI WAS UNABLE TO TRAVEL TO LANCASTER

Institute for Advanced Studies, Meeting Room 1

Adam Jaworski, Cardiff University

Language as Spectacle: The Linguistic Landscape of Tourism

Multilingual signage is an indispensable part of the tourist landscape consumed as part of the visitors' quest for cultural distinction and local authenticity, and motivated by tourist destinations' attempts to position themselves as globalized, responding to and accommodating their visitors' assumed linguistic repertoires. In the process, language becomes a cultural commodity; it is recontextualized and put on display as part of the performance of place and identity; its mundane forms (e.g. greetings) are turned into multimodal welcoming spectacles combining elaborate font design, iconic imagery, national and regional symbols, and intertextual play. In these instances of mediated, fleeting contact between tourists and hosts, language is represented rather than lived (Debord 1995 [1967]), symbolic and celebratory rather than instrumental. In this talk, I will consider the 'meaning' of different language codes, genres and styles 'on the move', i.e. when they appear to have shifted from one context to another as part of the global flows of people and signifiers, in relation to the political economy of tourism and the ideologies of language and nation-state. A wide range of illustrative examples (including emplaced language and postcards) will be drawn from tourist destinations in the global 'core' and 'periphery', highlighting contrasts between 'grassroots' and 'elite' literacies, persisting regional inequalities, and access to resources fostered by global capitalism.

27 April 2010 -- MULTIMODALITIES SEMINAR

Gunther Kress, Institute of Education, University of London

Modes as cultural technologies of transcription

Transcription, we know, is theory laden. It is a technology which renders the materials we have gathered useable for answering our question. It is a process of designed 'reduction', in which the world is shaped, pared down, for the purposes of analysis. The advent of multimodality in the areas, broadly, of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, has drawn attention to the 'boundedness', the limitations, of speech and writing in 'capturing' what goes on in the world, and in 'shaping' what has been 'captured'. It is a paring down, a narrowing,  in line with the affordances of a specific mode. That makes it possible to see mode itself in the light of the metaphor of transcription: 'rendering' the world according to the potentials / affordances of a mode. Given the differing affordances of modes and their differing logics it is possible to see modes as technologies of transcription, each with a specific take on the world in the frame, each differently able to supply materials as data to be for our questions.

4 May 2010

Nigel Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University

Erasable writing technologies: a material history

It is a tribute to the staying power of writing that so much of it still exists in so many forms in museums, libraries and archives.

However, a vast amount has been designed out of existence by being created using erasable writing technologies. These have been an intrinsic partners of other writing technologies for thousands of years and clearly have been a very significant elements in people's writing experiences. This session will present a brief look at the major (and some of the minor) erasable writing technologies that have accompanied human activity across five millennia.

MONDAY 10 May 2010

LRDG visit to the Hesketh Collection

At 1.30pm on 10th May 2010 (NB Monday rather than our usual Tuesday) we will have a private viewing of the Hesketh collection in the library. This extraordinary collection is temporarily on loan to the university.

This is a wonderful opportunity to view this remarkable collection - some items you can hold for yourself. See the first editions of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson's collected works, the first item off the Caxton press, a C11th prayer book, enormous C19th folia containing stunning botanical and ornithological paintings, a portfolio of original Redoute paintings and letters from Queen Elizabeth I to Mary, Queen of Scots.

This collection will shortly be returned into private hands, probably to be sold and possibly even leave the country.

In order to join the visit you must pre-register by sending your name in advance to Jessica Abrahams ( j.abrahams@lancs.ac.uk ). Places for this visit are limited to 10; however if you are unsuccessful in joining this group we will suggest an alternative arrangement to you. If you do book and have to drop out though, please let us know.

Meet just inside the library at 1.25pm. The visit will last one hour.

18 May 2010

Colin Adams, University of Liverpool

'Graffiti and literacy practices in Roman Egypt'

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of Greek Kings, the Ptolemies, until its annexation as a Roman province in 30 BC, from which time it remained a province until the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Greeks and Romans, resident in Egypt have left their mark, not just in monumental buildings and texts preserved on papyrus, but also engraved in stone, formally as inscriptions, and informally as graffiti. A sharp eye and close inspection reveals thousands of graffiti on buildings, temples, shrines, and even in rock walls in the inhospitable deserts. As a literary genre, they have received very little attention from scholars of the ancient world, but they reveal much of interest: nomenclature, travel patterns, cultural curiosity and an interest in tourism, patterns of faith and belief, and literacy. This paper will introduce the evidence and discuss a number of these issues, and among other things, consider patterns of literacy and intertextuality.

25 May 2010

Carole Sedgwick, Lancaster University

Crossing borders: the feasibility of harmonising academic literacy standards across Europe

The Bologna Declaration (1999) is an agreement to harmonise degree qualifications in Europe in order to promote mobility for work and education between signatory countries. However, to what extent is it possible to create common standards between universities that are in different cultural and linguistic contexts? What do we need to consider in order to enable students to participate as writers on a similar academic programme in a different cultural and linguistic context?

This paper reports findings in relation to a qualitative study of literacy practices on postgraduate English language majors at two universities, each in a different cultural and linguistic context, Hungary and Italy. An ethnographic approach was taken to data collection and analysis to investigate literacy practices in relation to the MA theses in each university that had been graded. Interviews were conducted with students, assessors and supervisors and graded theses, feedback and contextual documentation were collected. The paper will present and discuss the analysis in relation to a theme that was prominent in the data, originality.

1 June 2010 -- MULTIMODALITIES SEMINAR

Charles Forceville, Dept of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Researching multimodal metaphor in commercials and film

The Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that metaphor is primarily a matter of thought, not of language (see Kövecses 2010). However, until recently, CMT almost exclusively focused on verbal expressions of conceptual metaphor. But in order to test claims about metaphor's pervasive role in cognition, it is necessary to extend research to non-verbal and multimodal specimens (Forceville & Urios-Aparisi 2009). In this paper I will outline what research questions in this young branch of metaphor studies await scholarly answers, drawing on two genres: commercials and fiction film. Issues include: what is the function of particular modes/modalities (visuals, language, sound, music) in the identification and interpretation of metaphors? Are modes equally distributed over a metaphor's topic and vehicle? How does genre awareness affect the processing of metaphors?

Systematically studying multimodal metaphor is a vast project that urgently requires work by linguists knowledgeable about audiovisual mass-culture, and by media students knowledgeable about linguistics, and will benefit the study of cognition and metaphor as well as advance the theorization of multimodal discourse.

References

Forceville, Charles, and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds (2009). Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin : Mouton de Gruyter.

Kövecses, Zoltán (2010). Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (revised edition). Oxford : Oxford University Press.

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/c.j.forceville/

8 June 2010 -- MULTIMODALITIES SEMINAR

Brian Street , King's College London

Bringing together the fields of multimodality and literacy studies

In a Foreword to Travel Notes (see ref below) Gunther Kress and I noted:

‘The authors in this volume all attempt to bring together work from two recent fields of inquiry, that of Multimodality and that of Literacy Studies. In the former, Kress and others have attempted to redress the emphasis on language as the salient mode of communication in favour of a recognition of how other modes – visual, gestural, kinaesthetic – are key communicative practices: they are developing a language of description for such modes that enables us to see their characteristic forms, their affordances and their distinctive links with each other. Likewise, those in the field of New Literacy Studies in particular have attempted to provide a new language of description for viewing literacy in its social context: again wishing to change the emphasis of the past, especially that in educational contexts, Street and others have attempted to describe multiple literacy practices that vary across cultures and contexts'. We conclude:

‘The key question addressed by this volume is how these two fields of study can speak to each other, to find both correspondences and differences'.

That volume was published in 2006 and I will attempt in this presentation to build upon what we learned through that collaboration and to take into account the wealth of recent publications in both fields For instance, in a recent chapter in an Encyclopedia of Multimodality (Street et al, 2009)., the authors extend this strategy to ask:

‘what the New Literacy Studies can do to inform research premised on a multimodal perspective. Multimodality and New Literacy Studies, brought together, fills out a larger more nuanced picture of social positionings and communication by building an equal recognition of practices, texts, contexts, space, and time'.

I look forward to discussing these questions with such an informed audience.

References:

Kress, G and Street, B 2006 ‘Multi-Modality and Literacy Practices' Foreword to Travel notes from the New Literacy Studies: case studies of practice 2006 edited by Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell Multilingual Matters; Clevedon pp vii-x

Brian Street , Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell 2009 ‘Multimodality and New Literacy Studies', Chapter 15 of Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis Edited by Carey Jewitt

15 June 2010 -- MULTIMODALITIES SEMINAR

Diane Mavers, Institute of Education

Redesign in copying

Copying is generally conceptualized as exact replication and is judged by likeness to the original. From this standpoint, inaccuracies in writing are deemed to be a consequence of carelessness. Reporting on the copying of non-fiction texts in classroom-based research, this seminar investigates how, in these adjustments, children redesign the prior design of others. A pedagogic concern associated with copying is that children do not engage with meaning, that they do not have to think for themselves. If, as social semiotics purports, all text-making entails processes of meaning-making, then, in their copying, what do children attend to, and why? Framed by the notions of re-production, redesign and re-contextualization, the seminar investigates how children engage in ‘semiotic work' as they (re)shape meaning in lexis, capitalization, punctuation marks, spacing, presentation and layout in response to the particular curriculum task in the pedagogic context of the classroom. The analysis focuses on selection, omission and change by examining which features remain constant and where substitutions, transformations, amendments and additions are made. Findings are interpreted in the light of video and interview data. The relationship between ‘reading' and text-making in copying has implications for debates around representation and knowledge, and policies and practices in assessment.

22 June 2010

Maria Lucia Castanheira, CEALE / School of Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

The changing relationship between local and global literacies: Tracing changes in literacy practices in a Brazilian metropolitan neighbourhood between 1988 and 2010

In this presentation, I discuss the possibilities of examining the connections between local and global literacies through contrasting data from two ethnographic studies on literacy practices in a Brazilian metropolitan neighbourhood (Palmares). In one of these studies, developed in the late 80s, I examined the opportunities that preschool children had to engage with writing in their daily activities. This study involved participant observation in and out of school sites, interviews with children, their parents, teachers and school administrators. In 2009, adopting the same research perspective, I returned to this neighbourhood and re-entered the Field, where it was possible to re-encounter many of the previous research participants. The families have different configurations now and a new generation is engaging with new literacy practices. Contrasting data from these two studies, I aim to identify changes that have taken place over the years and to examine the implications of these changes for the meanings of literacy and the changing relations of local and global, for such people.

Autumn Term

12 October 2010

Welcome back

The Literacy Research Discussion Group celebrates its move back to the IAS building with an informal gathering in the Linguistics Department (C76 mixing bay).

19 October 2010

Changing practices in museum interpretation

Ian Gibson, County Museums Officer, Lancashire

Cabinets of Curiosities were popular with the public and were an early form of what we now call museums. However, the first museum in the U.K., in the sense that we now use the term museum, was the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London – opened in 1660.  The British Museum opened in 1759.  These early museums were not really for the hoi polloi, although had they thought to make that statement it would have come from their classical Greek scholars. The adaptation of the expression into English seems to have happened in the early nineteenth century.

Early object labels were written by expert curators who were so expert as to be incomprehensible to those not intimately acquainted with their subject specialisms.  This talk seeks to show something of the changes in museum practices that have occurred over the last 250 years, and poses the question:- “Has popularisation gone too far?”

26 October 2010

Discussion of recent papers and activities

2 November 2010

Adolescents' linguistic practices in College-affiliated Bulletin Board Systems(BBSs) in Taiwan

Ruby Chen

This research project investigates adolescents’ online literacy practices in a bulletin board system (BBS) in Taiwan.  I focus on their writing including how linguistic features carried over from their spoken language repertoire are transformed into orthography.  Resources available to them include scripts associated with Mandarin Chinese and English. Taiwanese, their native spoken language, does not have a strong written tradition, but this problem is solved by digraphia which is defined as the use of two or more different writing systems for a single language (Dale, 1980).  Digital literacy practices involving digraphia become very interesting phenomena.  In this presentation, I explore some of the creative ways in which the college students make use of the resources of BBS as their everyday literacy practices to construct their social network and express identity in this online community of practice.

9 November 2010

On dialect spelling, social practice and sociolinguistic salience

Kevin Watson, Lancaster University / Patrick Honeybone, University of Edinburgh

This talk reports on a recent investigation into a phenomenon in which non-standard spelling is common in professionally produced, published English. Specifically, we discuss a literary genre – which we label contemporary humorous localized dialect literature (CHLDL) – in which attempts are made at using semi-phonetic spellings to represent non-standard varieties of English in print. As we will see, there has been little systematic linguistic investigation of this particular genre of dialect writing, despite the fact that it represents an authentic linguistic and cultural phenomenon which is very popular throughout Britain and the United States. When similar writing has been investigated by linguists, it has often been criticized, in part because of its light-hearted nature and subjective, assumption-laden approach to the representation of linguistic detail (cf Preston 2002). 

In this paper, we show that the potential value of such writing has been overlooked.  We argue that if orthography is conceived as a social practice in which spelling choices are the result of an author’s meaningful decisions (cf Sebba 2007, 2009), then any respellings have the potential to shed light on those linguistic features which have become ‘enregistered’ in a given variety (Agha 2003). With this view, avenues are opened up which allow a range of issues to be considered, such as the notion of sociolinguistic salience, and in particular how linguists can tap into and explore the relative salience of certain linguistic variables.  We explore these avenues in this talk by investigating a small, newly compiled corpus of ‘folk dictionaries’, each of which attempts to represent the variety of English spoken in Liverpool, in the north-west of England.  This particular variety of English, popularly called 'Scouse', is well known in England because it has a number of phonological characteristics which distinguish it from surrounding accents (see Knowles 1973, Honeybone 2001, Watson 2007), and also because it is stigmatised (Coupland & Bishop 2007, Montgomery 2007). 

However, whilst we know that a Scouse accent is stigmatised as a whole, we know little about which of its phonological features contribute to that stigma.  We show how CHLDL can help contribute to a discussion of this issue, and provide a number of suggestions for how such writing might be incorporated into future variationist sociolinguistic work.

16 November 2010

Katy and the internet: some perspectives on the embededness of internet use in a particular family’s literacy practices 

Awena Carter

In this paper I examine the way in which four-year-old Katy’s literacy development is embedded in the literacy practices of three generations of her family. I look particularly at the contrasting ways in which her parents and grandparents make choices about internet use for both professional and personal purposes, and the dynamic between these choices and their use of books. I trace the ways in which such choices are discernable in the production of a book Katy authored and show that, whereas for the adults of both generations learning to use the internet involved familiarisation with a developing technology, for Katy this technology is a normal part of everyday life.

23 November 2010

Changing lifeworlds, changing writing: researching how adults take on new writing practices at times of change

Karin Tusting and Amy Burgess

30 November 2010

Aganetha and Isaac go to school:  A principal's reflections on the in- and out-of -school literacies of Mennonite children

Wendy A. Crocker, PhD Candidate, University of Western Ontario, Canada

This presentation is a small piece of my larger doctoral work which explores the relationship between school literacy and the literacies of minoritized learners through the narratives of principals.  I take as my case the conservative colony Mennonite children and their administrators in specific public elementary schools.  These learners navigate between school literacy, as prescribed by Ministry of Education expectations and measured by large scale provincial assessments, and out-of-school literacies circumscribed by religious and cultural beliefs in a first language (Plautdietsch) that is rarely written or read. I will present my stories of being an elementary principal in rural southwestern Ontario in a school with a significant population of Mennonite students to illustrate how I began to question my beliefs about literacy and what it means to be ‘literate’ in an Ontario school. 

7 December 2010

When Diglossia Meets Digraphia: Reading Egyptian Arabic in Arabic Script and Latin Script

Mariam Aboelezz

Latinised Arabic (LA) is spreading from online to offline mediums in Egypt where it is used to represent Egyptian Arabic within a diglossic setting. LA, which is a digraphic variant of Arabic in Arabic script, can now be found in regulated spaces such as printed, edited magazines. The growing popularity of LA in such contexts can no longer be accounted for by lack of technological support for non-Latin scripts nor can it be attributed to the frequently mentioned explanation that Latin script is easier to type than Arabic script. In fact, it has recently been claimed that LA is easier to read than Arabic script. To investigate the validity of this claim, two reading experiments were conducted with 19 bilingual Egyptian subjects to compare the reading of Egyptian Arabic – an uncodified variety – in Latin script (EAL) and Arabic script (EAA). The texts were taken from printed magazines and the design of the experiments was informed by insights from reading, readability and fluency research. In the first experiment, the reading speed and accuracy rate of EAA and EAL were gauged against these measures in texts of Modern Standard Arabic and English from the same magazines. In the second experiment, disfluency features such as pauses, false starts, repair, etc, were used to work out a disfluency index for EAA and EAL, while errors were represented in an error index. The results were then used to verify the findings from the first experiment. The experiments revealed that while EAA was read more fluently, EAL was read more accurately. A direct relationship between reading speed and fluency was found, but the relationship between fluency and accuracy was ambiguous. A supplementary qualitative analysis of error types also indicated that reading accuracy does not necessarily reflect reading comprehension.

14 December 2010

Discussion of recent papers and activities