The Impact of ICT on Literacy Education

Richard Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134446988
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This authoritative landmark text examines the highly topical and important issue of ICT in literacy learning. Its distinctive focus on providing a systematic review of research in the field gives the reader an essential, comprehensive overview.

As governments worldwide continue to invest heavily in ICT provisions in educational institutions, this book addresses the need to gather and synthesise evidence about the impact of ICT on literacy learning.

An expert team of writers draw upon two recent reports by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, which highlighted the considerable differences between nations in the access and use of ICT, to take a discursive and expansive look at the subject.

Within its wide range and scope, chapters cover areas on:

* the history of literacy and ICT
* evidence for the effectiveness of ICT on literacy learning
* the impact of networked ICT on literacy learning
* the relationship between verbal and visual literacies.

This book will be an invaluable and informative read with international resonance for student teachers, teachers, academics and researchers worldwide.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Richard Andrews, Alison Robinson and Carole Torgerson

The impact of ICT on literacy learning in English is a topical and important issue. There is a need for an authoritative review of research in this field, not least because governments worldwide are investing heavily in the provision of hardware and software to educational institutions as well as in the training of teachers and students of all ages in the application of ICT in literacy learning. To date there has been no such review. We need to gather and synthesize evidence about the impact of ICT on literacy learning.

Between March 2001 and June 2003, the English Review Group, based at the University of York, carried out a two-part systematic review in attempting to answer the overall question ‘What is the impact of ICT on literacy learning in English, 5–16?’ The first year consisted of the development of a map of the field, followed by an in-depth review on the impact of networked ICT (i.e. email and the Internet). ¹ The second year looked at a number of aspects of the impact of ICT on literacy learning: effectiveness (by identifying and synthesizing all the randomized experimental research); moving image; literature-related literacies; and software packages for teaching language and/or literature in English as a first and/or additional language. These separate in-depth reviews form the basis of the chapters in this book, with the addition of a chapter on the methodology used to undertake the systematic review.

The overall aim of the project has been to determine the impact of ICT on literacy learning for 5–16-year-olds.

Definitional and conceptual issues

Literacy can be defined narrowly, as the ability to understand and create written language. It is, however, frequently defined in two broader senses, and both are included in the present study. First, the scope can be expanded so that written language becomes written language and graphical or pictorial representation. Second, the skill can be treated as social, rather than psychological; in this view, literacy is the ability to operate a series of social or cultural representations. We have chosen ‘literacy’ for a number of reasons: first, to delimit the field of enquiry to reading and writing; second, to distinguish the learning of literacy from the subject English as taught in the National Curriculum for England and as a school subject in other countries; third, because as a term (especially in its pluralistic sense of ‘literacies’) it is both narrowly definable and open to wider interpretation; and fourth, because it allows us to review research that takes place outside formal education, e.g. in homes and other communities in which young people operate. In the studies that follow, we focus on reading and writing (in the broadest senses of those terms). Such delimiting of the focus of our project does not mean that the results will not be relevant to the teaching of literacy in other countries; nor that we will limit ourselves to research undertaken in England. On the contrary, our net is spread wide.

ICT stands for ‘information and communication technologies’. In the present project, we limited ourselves to stand-alone and networked technologies with a multimodal interface, i.e. networked and stand-alone computers, mobile phones with the capacity for a range of types of communication, and other technologies which allow multimodal and interactive communication.

By ‘English’ we mean, for the purposes of this study, English as a first or second (or additional) language learnt as a medium of instruction in school or spoken and written at home (and, for example, encountered on the Internet) – not as a ‘foreign’ language in, for example, a modern foreign languages department. In terms of commonly used abbreviations, we include ESL and EAL, but exclude EFL.

There remains controversy about the term ‘impact’. We have chosen the term for the present project in order to stand between the precision of the term ‘effect’ (which would require randomized controlled trials and/or controlled trials to determine such outcomes) and the broad (and vague) generality of the term ‘influence’. A recent publication from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (Coles 2002) explores the meaning of the term ‘impact’ by defining a number of receivers of impact: individuals, groups, institutions and curricula or regulations/procedures. Because our focus is on literacy learning, we have concentrated on the impact on individuals and groups of young people rather than on institutions or curricula.

One final but important conceptual issue has emerged during the course of the research. By assuming the impact of x on y (of ICT on literacy learning) we have assumed a causal one-way connection and have thus operated within a broad scientific paradigm. Although such an approach has many virtues and has shed light on such a connection, we acknowledge that the broader relationship between ICT and literacy learning is probably symbiotic. A symbiotic relationship would have implications for the design of research studies that attempted to explore further the connection between ICT and literacy.

Impact or symbiosis?

The question of whether to approach the relationship between ICT and literacy from a causal, scientific perspective or via an assumption of the symbiotic relationship between the two has many implications. To date, we have attempted to investigate the relationship within a causal paradigm. We have taken this approach because it is a question – ‘What is the impact of ICT on literacy learning?’ – that teachers and policy-makers have asked us to try to answer. We have also been interested in the answer ourselves.

Part of the problem with such a question is that, as some of the chapters acknowledge, literacy and ICT are moving targets. Put scientifically, it is hard to control the variables that are at play in each area. It is not only the case that the targets have moved during the course of our project; they have been moving for over ten years – and, indeed, for thousands of years. Technology has an intimate relationship with literacy: the ability to make marks on rock; the invention of the stylus and of parchment; the printing revolution; the more recent ICT revolution. All these stages in the development of what it means to be literate (and, by implication, illiterate) are tied up with the means by which literacy is expressed.

The relationship between ICT and literacy is therefore two-way: new technologies are conceived by new literacies as much as the other way round. It is possible to focus on the impact of ICT on literacy learning, as we have done, but the larger picture must be acknowledged. As each of these agents affects, impacts and influences the other, so they both change. At the very least, what we have tried to do in the current project is to see how clear an answer we can get to the question, ‘What is the impact of ICT on literacy learning?’ In answering that question, we hope to have contributed to the wider debate.

For a further discussion of the problem, see Andrews (2003a, 2003b).

Policy and practice background

There has been much literature on the topic that is exciting and speculative. Much of this literature emerged in the early 1990s as the Internet began to become more widely used, especially in schools. The UK government, for instance, has invested a large amount of money over a number of years in the provision of computers to schools. Equally, many (not all) families use computers at home and young people are increasingly using them to research, word-process, compose and present homework – and for a number of other functions. Questions remain, however, on what impact ICT has on schooling and in particular on literacy learning.

In addition, many of the same complementary projects, reports and publications still apply. For example, the New Opportunities Fund ICT training for teachers programme, which has been training all primary and secondary teachers in schools in the UK since 1999, was completed in the summer of 2003. The ImpaCT2 project, which concentrated on the impact of ICT at Key Stages 2 and 3 in the core subjects of English, Maths and Science, published its final report in 2002 (BECTa/DfES 2002) and is discussed in the following section. Various other initiatives, at international (OECD), national, regional and local levels, continue to take place.

Ofsted, the UK’s Office for Standards in Education (2001, 2002) has published reviews on the impact of government initiatives on standards and on literacy. It concludes (2001: 2) that there is ‘emerging evidence of a link between high standards across the curriculum and good ICT provision’ but that the ‘contribution of ICT to the raising of standards in individual subjects remains variable’ – a finding confirmed in the ImpaCT2 study. Specifically, the 2001 report on the impact of ICT in schools notes that:

in English, for example, CD-ROMs of Internet searches are sometimes used well to support the development of reading skills. Pupils make good progress where they have the skills to select relevant information, frame research questions…take concise notes and recast information in their own words.

(Ofsted 2001: 9)

Furthermore,

Pupils’ standard of written composition is raised where they use wordprocessing to help them draft, review and edit imaginatively, and exploit the provisional status of the word-processed text to full effect.

(Ibid.)

The 2002 (Ofsted 2002) review of the impact of the National Literacy Strategy on practice and attainment notes the following with regard to ICT:

• the use of ICT in the teaching of literacy continues to improve steadily, but remains limited in around one in four schools
• there is still a big gap ‘between the schools where ICT is used effectively and those where its contribution to pupils’ learning is very limited’ (p.)
• where ICT work is related to literacy, it is generally concerned with research and non-chronological report-writing
• the use of computers for literacy by pupils in classrooms is mostly confined to individual work on phonics and spelling programs, and for composing and editing text on the computer. The copying of handwritten text onto a computer, which was common in the early days of the National Literacy Strategy, is now rare.

A summary paper on developing effective practice with ICT has been published by BECTa (BECTa nd).

In New Zealand, one of the most telling recent studies has been by Parr (2002). The study, entitled A Review of the Literature on Computer-Assisted Learning, particularly Integrated Learning Systems, and Outcomes with Respect to Literacy and Numeracy, concludes that ‘the effectiveness of computer-assisted lear...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Evidence for the Effectiveness of ICT On Literacy Learning
• Chapter 3: The Impact of Networked ICT On Literacy Learning
• Chapter 4: ICT, Literacy Learning and ESL Learners
• Chapter 5: ICT and Literature: A Faustian Compact?
• Chapter 6: ICT and Moving Image Literacy In English
• Chapter 7: Methodological Issues
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Appendix 1: English Review Group Working Document
• Appendix 2: EPPI-Centre Educational Keywording Sheet
• Appendix 3: Examining Heterogeneity In Meta-Analysis
• Glossary