Technology allows us to learn new languages and communicate with others relatively free oftime and place. Although technology has already proven its effectiveness for languagelearning outside the classroom, the potential of this effectiveness for in-class learning andteaching has yet to be explored in detail. Traditional research methods such as interviews andsurvey data tend to fall short in accurately describing digital literacy practices that are outsidethe scope of the researcher. This paper presents a study in which multimodal data, collectedthrough wearable technology, is used to map trajectories of digital English literacy practicesof students across various spaces outside the classroom. This method illustrates howmultimodal data can provide better insight into digital literacy events as they move acrosssocial spaces than traditional forms of data collection. It also demonstrates how multimodaldata can be used as the input for focus group sessions to corroborate findings and addvalidity to qualitative data in research on digital English literacy practices.Keywords: digital literacy practices; English teacher education; mediated discourse analysis; multimodal data IntroductionThis paper presents an alternative method to study literacy practices in times in which our learning and communication practices are increasingly mediated by digital technology. This trend is affecting not only the way we learn and communicate, but also how we research the development of these practices. One major hurdle in this form of research is that, unlike traditional literacy practices, digital technology creates opportunities to engage in our literacy practices relatively free of time and space. This development makes it challenging for researches and educators since literacy development is no longer just situated in the bounded classroom, but rather over a network of connected spaces. In addition, learners engage in more and increasingly diverse literacy events and interact with a large amount of resources. This paper demonstrates how literacy practices can be studied taking in a more ubiquitous context using a combination of multimodal data collection through wearable technology alongside more traditional research instruments. This paper intends to illustrate that the addition of wearable visual tracking to more traditional instruments of data collection allows for a more comprehensive understanding of learners" literacy practices and the digital tools they use.
Digitally mediated service encounters such as digital payments are becoming more common and super-sticky social media such as WeChat, applications which mediate an indispensible part of our day-to-day practices, are increasingly used as the main tool for these services. However, how digital technology affects the way semiotic modes realize lower level actions in service encounters has not widely been studied. This paper carried out a multimodal analysis of videoed service encounters combined with interviews and ethnographic field notes to analyze how the use of WeChat Pay affects how modes such as proxemics, gaze and gesture realize lower level actions such as handing, smartphone handling, and ratifying payments. Second, analyses of the wider semiotic trajectories involved in the use of super-sticky social media in digitally mediated service encounters show how a mundane digital payment has important implications for how we record and disclose our personal behavior in big data and for the distribution of knowledge and skills deploying semiotic resources and digital literacies in society.
In October 2018, a collaboration between young rap artists in Thailand’s Indy rap scene, Rap Against Dictatorship (RAD), launched a video criticizing the ruling Junta that went viral within days of publication. The Junta soon after released its own video as a response to RAD. The production and publication of both videos are what Scollon (2001) calls social actions mediated by a distinct cultural toolkit. This study analyzed how modes such as music, text, color, camera angle, gestures, voice, image and iconicity emerged in both videos to realize scalar differences in civic participation. The Junta’s video represents a high sociolinguistic scale, whereas RAD realizes a lower scale. In a time of political unrest in Thailand, sociolinguistic scale and the semiotic resources that people employ to realize scales are a lens to analyze how different stakeholders address various perspectives of the political situation and appeal to different levels of civic participation.
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