Young children’s engagement with digital texts and literacies in the home

Davidson, C. (2009). Young children's engagement with digital texts and literacies in the home: Pressing matters for the teaching of English in the early years of schooling. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8(3), 36-54.

Background

The author was concerned that the early education curriculum in New Zealand, which was traditionally very print-oriented, was not keeping up with the literacy needs of a new generation of digital natives. Computers and other technologies were profoundly influencing the literacy development of these pre-school children who were developing a new digital literacy where the emphasis was on how they generated, communicated and negotiated meaningful content when handling web information.

Aims

By studying the talk generated by pre-school children with their parents and siblings as they used the computer and other digital technologies to learn about a topic of interest at home, the author’s purpose was to study the type of computer-enabled social interactions produced by the children. The emergence of such digitally-enabled social interactions could inform the current literacy curriculum in elementary education.

Sample

The participants were young children from four families with ages ranging from two to six.

Method

Conversation analysis was used to make sense of the children’s social interaction in a typical domestic event where the children used Google, Wikipedia and a book to search for information on a topic of interest under parental supervision. The conversations were video-recorded and transcribed.

Findings

The results suggested that first, the children together with their parents could produce meaningful content through talk while searching for information about a topic of interest. Meaningful content in the conversations included talk about seeking information, discovery of new information, affirmation of prior knowledge and even identification of not knowing not just by the children but also by the parent. The use of interactional resources such as summonses and directives, together with pointing and moving the cursor by the children, for example, produced socially recognisable communicative acts. Second, the social activity during the talk as the children and parents navigated the multimodal texts also helped both parties to increase their knowledge about the topic, searches, images and print. Third, the children were observed to be able to move seamlessly between different technologies and texts.

Implications

The findings confirmed for the author the early literacy development in particular, of digital literacy, as children are now exposed to computers and mobile technologies even before going to school. Hence, early education systems needed to recognise this trend and review their current curriculum, which was dominated by print texts.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.