Moblogging in Science Classrooms

Lee, Q. Y. S. (2010). Mobile blogging in primary science in Singapore: A linguistic perspective (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://libris.nie.edu.sg/

Background

Moblogging or mobile blogging is a method of posting entries to a website or blog from mobile phones. This study takes a linguistic perspective on educational moblogging by investigating whether language use is affected when mobile phones are used as tools for text production.

Aims

The purpose of this research was to analyse mobile blog posts produced in a Primary 3 Science lesson that documented the growth of green bean plants with the use of a mobile phones.

Sample

A class of 39 higher-ability Primary 3 students from one school in Singapore participated in the study. Their ages were between eight and nine years at the time moblogging was implemented.

Method

The investigation was carried out during Science lessons through the textual and visual analysis of moblogging entries documenting the growth of green bean plants individually planted by the students. A sample of 100 moblogging entries texted on the mobile phones and sent to the class blog through a multimedia messaging service (MMS) by an equal number of boys and girls was examined using Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as the framework for textual analysis.

Findings

Analysis on the congruency between meanings represented revealed that students lacked the ability to harness both text and visuals as semiotics (signs or symbols) to achieve a common communicative purpose in the creation of multimodal texts like moblog posts.

Implications

As part of the discussion in this study, a Visual-Text Agreement Framework was proposed to guide educators in teaching Visual Literacy as part of the literacy programme in schools. The author suggests that communication mediated by mobile phones should be introduced into the classroom as a context for language learning as mobile blogging is now widely used in society. If it was introduced in schools, students would need to be taught how to use the new media appropriately since moblogging creates multimodal texts and teachers would need to teach students to harness the power of such texts and visuals for effective communication.

Original article retrieved from NIE Digital Repository.