A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century

Análisis de la intención de realizar comercio social en webs con herramientas sociales

El comercio social, o comercio a través de los medios sociales (también conocido como social commerce) es una de las modalidades de comercio electrónico con mayor potencial de crecimiento. Sin embargo, su estudio aún es limitado, por lo que las dinámicas y elementos que afectan a la intención de realizar comercio social requieren de una mayor investigación. La bibliografía existente principalmente analiza la intención de los usuarios de practicar comercio social en una red social, pero no en una web de comercio electrónico que tenga sus propias herramientas sociales (p. ej. foros, valoraciones de productos, etc.). Por lo tanto, la presente investigación tiene como objetivo identificar los antecedentes de la intención de comercio social en webs de comercio electrónico en las que se emplean herramientas sociales. A partir de la revisión de la literatura, se desarrolla un modelo para analizar la influencia de cinco posibles antecedentes de la intención de comercio social: calidad de la web, apoyo social emocional, apoyo social informativo, presencia social e inmersión o flow. Para ello, se realizó un estudio empírico entre los usuarios de una web de comercio electrónico que cuenta con un sistema de valoración, comentarios de productos y foros. Los datos se obtuvieron a partir de una encuesta realizada a 200 compradores, y fueron analizados mediante la técnica PLS. Los resultados indican que los elementos más racionales y emocionales de la experiencia del usuario, como son la calidad del sitio web, flow y el apoyo social emocional, son los que motivan la compra; mientras que la presencia social y el apoyo social informativo, no son significativos. Este estudio contribuye a la teoría del comportamiento del consumidor al aplicar variables predictivas de la intención de comercio social a webs con herramientas sociales. Además, los resultados ayudan a los profesionales del comercio electrónico a mejorar el uso que hacen de las herramientas sociales.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Discourse and Digital Practices

Discourse and Digital Practices shows how tools from discourse analysis can be used to help us understand new communication practices associated with digital media, from video gaming and social networking to apps and photo sharing. This cutting-edge book: draws together fourteen eminent scholars in the field including James Paul Gee, David Barton, Ilana Snyder, Phil Benson, Victoria Carrington, Guy Merchant, Camilla Vasquez, Neil Selwyn and Rodney Jones answers the central question: "How does discourse analysis enable us to understand digital practices?" addresses a different type of digital media in each chapter demonstrates how digital practices and the associated new technologies challenge discourse analysts to adapt traditional analytic tools and formulate new theories and methodologies examines digital practices from a wide variety of approaches including textual analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, object ethnography, geosemiotics, and critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Digital Practices will be of interest to advanced students studying courses on digital literacies or language and digital practices

Nation Branding Online. Multimodal Analysis of the BRIC Official Business Websites

This study explores and identifies the strategies for ‘nation branding’ used by website producers of the BRIC countries’ official trade and business websites. ‘National Branding’ is defined in this thesis as the promotion of a particular country to foreigners. Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) are grouped into the same category of fast economic growth countries. The main research question for this thesis is ‘How are these BRIC’s official business websites created and how does this represent them individually?’ The goal of this research is to better understand the representation of each of the BRIC countries online and how this ‘image’ is achieved by the websites’ multimodal approach. The multimodality method of analysis in this research took into account the combination of website dynamic design (images, text, colors, structure, and functions) to shed light and knowledge upon the websites’ usability, and individual represented ‘metaphor’. Alongside multimodality, social semiotics theory was used as a framework of analysis to draw upon the conclusions of the research. After conducting the research and drawing upon conclusions, the researcher sees that national culture has a very small role to play, if any, in its image online. Brazil’s online image in this research was well-dressed but only half-functioning. Russia took on a minimalistic and serious style. India had a lack of individuality as it adopted a textbook style and was too general in the materials presented on its website. China adopted a color scheme and website structure that can be compared to a military uniform, one that is organized and mostly functioning.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Discourse and Digital Practices

Discourse and Digital Practices shows how tools from discourse analysis can be used to help us understand new communication practices associated with digital media, from video gaming and social networking to apps and photo sharing. This cutting-edge book: draws together fourteen eminent scholars in the field including James Paul Gee, David Barton, Ilana Snyder, Phil Benson, Victoria Carrington, Guy Merchant, Camilla Vasquez, Neil Selwyn and Rodney Jones answers the central question: "How does discourse analysis enable us to understand digital practices?" addresses a different type of digital media in each chapter demonstrates how digital practices and the associated new technologies challenge discourse analysts to adapt traditional analytic tools and formulate new theories and methodologies examines digital practices from a wide variety of approaches including textual analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, object ethnography, geosemiotics, and critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Digital Practices will be of interest to advanced students studying courses on digital literacies or language and digital practices

How Social Anxiety and Social Factors Influence and Moderate Social Commerce

Following the fast growth of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in the cyber world recently, social commerce has become an important emerging issue on the Internet. Researchers have studied not only online factors but also offline factors, according to the offline-to-online consumer-behavior model. Hence, this study applied approaches to social anxiety, online social interaction and online social support to comprehend the influences of social commerce intentions. After the research survey collected data from SNS (Facebook) users for one month, the researcher analyzed the data and made several findings. First, social anxiety positively moderates the relationship between online social support and social commerce intention. Second, online social interaction directly and indirectly affects social commerce intention through online social support. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are also discussed, providing several future research directions and suggestions for scholars and SNS operators, respectively

Exploring the relationship between electronic literacy and heritage language maintenance

This paper focuses on the electronic literacy practices of two Korean-American heritage language learners who manage Korean weblogs. Online users deliberately alter standard forms of written language and play with symbols, characters, and words to economize typing effort, mimic oral language, or convey qualities of their linguistic identity such as gender, age, and emotional states. However, little is known about the impact of computer-mediated nonstandard language use on heritage learners’ linguistic development. Through in-depth case studies of two siblings, the study examines the linguistic and pragmatic practices of these learners online and the perceived effects of non-standard forms of computer-mediated language on their heritage language development and maintenance. The data show that electronic literacy practices provide authentic opportunities to use the language and support the development of a social network of Korean speakers, which results in greater sociopsychological attachment to the Korean language and culture. The informants report that the deviant language forms found in e-texts enable them to engage in online interactions without the pressures of having to spell the words correctly. However, they express frustrations in not being able to distinguish between correct and non-standard forms of the language, which appear to be affecting their offline language use

Humour support and emotive stance in comments on Korean TV Drama

Viewers on viki.com comment on Korean television drama series while watching: They produce timed comments tied to the timecode of the audiovisual stream. Among the functions these comments have in the community, the expression of emotive stance is central. Importantly, this includes humour support encoded in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. Our study identifies a range of humour support indicators, which allow us to find comments that are responses to humour. Accordingly, our study explores how commenters make use of the affordances of the Viki timed comment feature to linguistically and paralinguistically encode their humorous reaction to fictional events and to previous comments. We do this both quantitatively e based on a multilingual corpus of all 320,118 timed comments that accompany five Korean dramas we randomly selected (80 episodes in total), and qualitatively based on the in-depth analysis of two episodes. What we contribute is a typology and the distribution of humour support indicators used in a novel genre of technology-mediated communication as well as insights into how the viewing community collectively does humour support. Finally, we also present the semi-automatic detection of humour support as a viable strategy to objectively identify humour-relevant scenes in Korean TV drama

NAVIGATING MOBILE LEARNING: ENGLISH LEARNERS’ LANGUAGE LEARNING AND LITERACY PRACTICES

Despite the fact that the majority of teenagers and young adults use smartphones, little research has studied English Learners’ (ELs’) actual mobile phone language practices, specifically, how and why ELs use their smartphones as language learning assistant devices (Godwin-Jones, 2008). The primary purpose of this qualitative study was to explore ELs’ perceptions of mobile-assisted language and literacy practices, and to document ELs’ literacy practices through their mobile devices. Drawing from New Literacies Studies (Gee, 2004, 2010; Kress, 2003), research questions that guided this study were as follows: 1) How do participants use mobile devices in their classes, and what features of mobile devices do they find useful (e.g., recordings, video, still photo, etc.)? 2) What mobile device applications do participants find important in school and/or in their everyday lives? 3) Is there a relationship between participants’ use of mobile devices and their identity in and out of school? Participants were four ELs aged from 15 to 21: Three high school students and one university student. Primary data for this study were semi-structured interviews collected over a three-month period. Data were analyzed using constant comparison, looking across participant interviews to generate themes. Several important findings emerged. First, participants utilized various applications/features for language learning, and their mobile device practices were inextricably linked to their social practices through their use of mobile phones. Second, participants intentionally used mobile devices as tools to translate, capture class notes, and seek out auxiliary materials to support their learning in school. Third, ELs’ reported that their transition from their home country to the US, resulted in a shift in their personality and identity and their mobile devices provided an emotional support. This study extends current literature and explains how mobile devices play an essential role in ELs’ lives in and out of school. With increasing EL populations in US schools, this study articulates ELs’ actual use of mobile devices, and how mobile devices are important to ELs’ success in the classroom