Feb 4 Question 6&8

I totally agree with van Leeuwen (2015) that students need to learn what they cannot be taught out of school in L1 and L2 writing classes. This issue is particularly knotty in a digital era as students have tons of online learning resources to resort to, and they are often more adept at utilizing these than teachers. But as far as I am concerned, we as teachers can still impart the following knowledge or skills to students, especially in L2 writing classrooms. The first and foremost is traditional writing literacies, for instance, vocabulary, grammar, discourse cohesion and coherence. Writing is in parallel with speaking since both of them is targeted at outwardly expressing one’s meanings, but writing is more concerned with organization of thought and paragraphs. This expertise cannot be absorbed systematically without teachers’ guidance, and they are also good anchors to lead the whole class. Moreover, we need to design technology-based activities to raise students’ awareness of audience and authorship as well as their identities and cultures. They belong to the higher-order thinking of language acquisition, which can be augmented by the processes of writing, such as searching online and making projects, instead of simply composing essays entitled like “Compare your culture with that of your L2, and write out the differences and the similarities”.  

One of the most challenging problems of digital technologies (and it is also its advantages) is how to sort out the things you want from fast-flowing information. It is not a learning-based issue, but is more urgent in the area of language learning since students are acquiring something, not just skimming and scanning. We should help students develop a sense of language users rather than language learners, as is often advocated by the proponents of usage-based theories. I think we can combine the training of several language skills, such as online reading and writing, to assist students in making use of what they get out of their L2 digital literacies. Cautions should be taken when selecting the web-based technologies, because I often hear from my students (and that is also my own feelings) that they do not want to mix the Apps they use for entertainment with those they employ for study.