What Reading Practices Students Invoked In Their Use And Understanding Of Digital Texts

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This study documents the literacy interests, motivations, and practices of two middle school literacy learners. In former studies (Burke & Rowsell, 2005; 2006), we interviewed students as they worked online to access what reading practices students invoked in their use and understanding of digital texts. In these studies, we had larger samples with a focus on reading path (Burke & Rowsell, 2005) and multimodal assessment (Burke & Rowsell, 2007). What we found previously is that student's use interface design to understand content, and more often than not, they Chanel Replica Jewelry think in terms of redesigning content to improve the meanings of texts. In this study, we broaden our perspective to include a U.S. site and a Canadian site. During the interviews, we asked the following questions:
Do you have access to a computer?
What websites do you like?
What do you like about them?
What do you not like about them?
How might you change them if you could?
How do these sites relate to texts that you study in school?

To ...
... explore digital reading practices of the students while working, we used stimulated recall as a way of having participants talk through their actions and movements. To complete the stimulated recall, we asked participants our research questions as they read through a website and audio taped the dialogue. The recordings were transcribed and compared with our anecdotal notes taken right after each 40-min¬ute session. To conduct this research, we sat beside student participants Peter and recorded their responses to the questions. In addition to the 40-minute interviews, we conducted follow-up interviews to probe unanswered questions.

Further interviews were conducted with participating teachers. In this way, the study used observational data alongside transcribed interview data. Pseudonyms are used to protect the identity of the participants.

Two case studies of digital reading practices are featured in this article. We opted for case studies because of their indicative and representative dimensions--that is, they signal practices inherent to digital reading practices that can be explored in future research. We adopt Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi's (2005) definition of case studies in On the Case:

Any detailed "case" (e.g., a studied teacher's pedagogy, a child's learning history) is just that--a case. It is not the phenomenon itself (e.g., effective teaching, writing development). That phenomenon may look and sound different in different social and cultural circumstances, that is, in different cases. This relationship between a grand phenomenon and mundane particulars suggests key theoretical assumptions of qualitative case studies, particularly those involving production of meaning and its dependence on context, (p. 4)

In our study, the particular situations of both participants and their relationship to their school settings contribute to our analysis of interviews and observational data. Case studies provide a unique picture of the reading practices that offer compelling research evidence. Denscombe (1998) provided a helpful insight into case study research, stating that "the aim is to illuminate the general by looking at the particular" (p. 30). Golby (1994) has made it clear that case studies are not a study of uniqueness, but of particularity. Golby also argued that to understand a "particular" case, connections to other cases need to be made, and an acute awareness of how this understanding is reached is required. In our study, we take an analytic generalization Chanel Jewelry Wholesale from the data to offer some insight into how we can learn about digital reading practices by interviewing a child while she works online in conjunction with a text analysis of the site.

The analytic framework drew on Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2001) framework of discourse, design, production, and distribution. To analyze online reading, we interpreted the specific learner, taking into consideration their chosen sites and their actions as they explored the sites.