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Current research projects.
Researching new literacies
in the multicultural classroom: Developing a ludic approach to linguistic
challenges in elementary education.
Heather Lotherington
& Jennifer Jenson (standard SSHRC)
This collaborative research creates the practical means to redesign
emergent literacy instruction for teachers, inform policy makers and
contribute to theory. The study creates and documents a pedagogical
process by informing, guiding, co-developing and supporting practicing
teachers’ innovative new literacies pedagogies that engage and
inspire contemporary children through immersive, playful digital approaches
that include rather than exclude their community-based linguistic, cultural
and social knowledge, as constructed both locally and digitally. The
project utilizes exploratory guided action research to focus on collaboratively
building new literacies pedagogies in the context of the classroom,
accommodating curricular imperatives, children’s social literacies,
and the particular interests of teachers while stretching their participation
in multiliterate production. By capitalizing on innovative digital possibilities
for immersive learning, we address the complex urban reality of the
linguistically heterogeneous classroom, which, in Ontario, has been
increasingly pushed towards conservative monoliterate practices by curricular
pressures and testing influences.
Visit Talk
Time
Respectful
Goats
The Window Woman: Introduction (original screenplay based on
The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis)
(Video coming soon)
TVOParents. Coming to Canada: Immigration Stories
Imagine a World
How does Twitter create
community? Mapping discourse in a research community through Tweets
Heather Lotherington (small SSHRC)
The growing popularity of
microblogging invites questions regarding the nature of conversation
and community building online. An analysis of Twitter as a platform
for facilitating collaboration must begin with understanding the unit
of the tweet–a 140 character message. Models of pragmatic analysis
that code the speech act as a minimal unit of thought are based on language
in physical time and space. Twitter offers a new, digitally-normed unit
of meaning. This project aims to examine the tweet as a communicative
unit: to analyze how it is used to carry a message, and facilitate interaction
in a digital microblogging environment.
Revising the EQAO: An
exploration of contemporary teenagers’ digital literacies
Heather Lotherington, Deanna
Neville-Verardi & Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda (small SSHRC)
Over the past two decades, the rapid development of networked digital
communications media has radically altered everyday literacies, introducing
new social trends, cultural practices and linguistic norms that call
into question the standards used to teach and test language and literacy
in formal education. In Ontario, high school students, no matter what
their linguistic profile, must successfully navigate the Ontario Secondary
School Literacy Test (OSSLT), established by the Educational Quality
and Accountability Office (EQAO), to be eligible for graduation. This
study canvassed two groups of adolescents living in the greater Toronto
area (GTA) who wrote the OSSLT in different years for their critiques
of a (past) authentic EQAO test, and a mock EQAO designed to tap adolescents’
knowledge of digital literacies and social media practices. The study,
which also descriptively documented the students’ English-medium
digital literacies, is published in:
Lotherington, H., Neville-Verardi, D., & Sinitskaya
Ronda, N. (2009). English in cyberspace: Negotiating hypertext literacies.
In L.B. Abraham & L. Williams (Eds.), Electronic discourses
in language learning and language teaching (pp. 11-41). Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Emergent Multiliteracies
in Theory and Practice: Multicultural literacy development at elementary
school
Emergent Multiliteracies in Theory and Practice extends the
collaborative research conducted at the school given the pseudonym Main
Street School in Rewriting Goldilocks.
This study, funded by SSHRC, will extend our teaching, creating and
documenting elementary school children's rewriting of traditional stories
into narratives that include cultural reinterpretations and multilingual
versions in ever-experimental digital shapes.
Rewriting Goldilocks:
Emergent Transliteracies
Rewriting
Goldilocks: Emergent Transliteracies is a study of multiliteracies in an elementary school in the Toronto District
School Board, exploring new directions in literacy that incorporate multiculturalism, multilingualism and multimodalism. Rewriting Goldilocks is designed to
provide children with a better understanding of narratives by guiding
them into the story as co-authors, facilitated by technology, rather
than teaching them as readers external to the world
of the story. The project bridges traditional reading and writing practices
and contemporary digital literacies, and makes the story of Goldilocks more inclusive
of contemporary social diversity. Our approach to story retelling using
digital media is intended to close some of the language, literacy
and cultural gaps facing children whose backgrounds are not reflected
in the Ontario curriculum.
For examples
of the children's rewritten Goldilocks stories see: http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/joyce/main/goldilocks/index.htm
Gifted Bilingual Writers: An
Exploration of Children's Home Language Practices
This case
study, co-researched by Heather Lotherington and
Allyson Eamer, investigates the language worlds of
a small group of gifted 10-year old bilingual and multilingual children - all
first or second generation Canadians - who collaboratively coauthored an
extraordinary book of fiction in English. Our study investigates their home
language practices to trace their patterns of language acquisition,
affiliation and use. The families’ home language maintenance or shift
patterns contextualize the children’s acquisition of English as
essentially additive or subtractive, and provide an interpretive filter for
their outstanding achievement in English creative writing. The study
qualitatively analyzes interviews with the families of the children, the
children themselves and the teachers who designed this special project
together with observational data of literacy resources at home and school.
Digitization and Language
Change
Digitization and Language Change, researched by Heather Lotherington and Xu Yejun at York University in 2002-2003, analyzes evolving
changes in orthographic, syntactic, discourse and sociocultural
conventions occurring in English and Chinese in digital environments, noting
trends across these languages as well as more limited, culturally and
linguistically specific evolutions. The converging conventional changes
occurring in these two major world languages suggest that similar transitions
are happening generally in languages used for online communication,
presenting teachers and students of second languages alike with conundrums as
to language and discourse standards.
sk8Celine (12:17:10 AM): do u like bon jovi?! (u better say yes!)
sk8Celine (12:17:12 AM): :-*
honeygarli (12:17:18 AM): sorry for taking you away
from your work
sk8Celine (12:17:23 AM): eee!!!!!!!!!!!!!
honeygarli (12:17:26 AM): jovi
is alright
sk8Celine (12:17:32 AM): this was phun:-[
honeygarli (12:17:33 AM): hehe.
sorry for reminding you
sk8Celine (12:17:46 AM): would u go to concert w/ me?! :-D
sk8Celine (12:17:56 AM): on reading wk
Online chats, such as this excerpt between honeygarli
and sk8Celine, two female twentysomethings, exemplify
variable ways of spelling, using emoticons (:-D); hybrid orthographies (w/);
abbreviations (wk); onomatopoeia (hehe); homophones
(u); novel word shapes (phun); creative
capitalization and punctuation (sk8Celine; eee!!!!!!!!!!!!!);
and new digital identities (honeygarli and
sk8Celine) to mention just a handful of innovative conventions.
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