New Literacy? or Not?

Dr. Schmidt's comments about new literacy inspired me to look further in this subject. I have been working on one project for a literacy class where I conduct a discourse analysis in the differences between written text and spoken language. An extract about the term, digital storytelling, was extracted from the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website (hosted by University of Houston College of Education) for comparison with three interviews describing the same topic. Those three speakers are graduate students from TESL/AL/ALT program of English Department, of whom two are native speakers and one L2 speakers, therefore, considered high proficiency speakers. Upon the preliminary analysis, the spoken discourse are found to be filled with pauses, fillers, repetitions, false starts and discontinuity in thoughts, single clauses and syntactic fragments whereas the written text is well organized and constructed with grammatically accurate complete sentences, which is due to the nature of how two sets of discourse were produced. The discourse analysis confirms the existence of the linguistic differences between the two different modes of language, which I would really love to share with the students of the CI 201 Lab hoping to help them understand the characteristics and see the needs to improve their written language and style. Grading their first assignments got me wandering if they are aware of the fact that written literacy differs from spoken literacy. Nowadays with so much socializing for the young generation takes place in texting and chatting contexts where they practically write what they would say, therefore, the differences between spoken and written discourse may not always be obvious. Fang (2008) also pointed out that young generation can’t tell the difference between oral and written discourse because they are used to text and chat. Furthermore, according to Thompson (2009), 38% of the writing that Stanford students did took place outside of the classroom, in other words, life writing. Maybe technology has pushed us on the road to new literacy. That is to say, the only place where the differences between written and spoken discourse are significant is in schools (Crowhurst 1999). However, I agree that students need to gradually “reconstitute their lexical grammar in the more abstract written mode” (Unsworth 1994) to meet the written literacy standard of academic works. It is obvious that, with the practice of students’ new literacy with technology, it will take them some time to become competent in handling both the production and the comprehension of written language. What's important is that teachers are aware of the differences, so they are in a better position to offer support and help to their students. As Perez (2004) puts it, “When teachers can see the strategies that children are using to interact and make sense of print and when those strategies can be viewed within the context of a natural, ordered, developmental process, teachers can support, reinforce, and provide a context for the continued development of these processes. “ (p 71)

References
Crowhurst, M. (1994). Language and learning across the curriculum. Scraborough, ON: Allyn and Bacon Canada.
Fang, Z. (2008). Going beyond the Fab Five: helping students cope with the unique linguistic challenges of expository reading in intermediate grades. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51 (6), 476-487.
Perez, B. (2004). Writing Across writing systems. In Perez, B. (Ed.), Socialcultural contexts of language and literacy (57-75). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Thompson, C. (2009). Clive Thompson on the new literacy. Retrieved September 11, 2009 from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson.
Unsworth, L. (1999). Developing critical understanding of the specialized language of school science and history texts: A functional grammatical perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 42 (7), 508-521.