Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

336 Part 4: Language and Literacy
and technology in tertiary education. For instance, Kramsch et al. (2000)
and Nelson (2006) explore ways that undergraduates learn language in
college classrooms. Both papers emphasize the way authorial voice has
changed in a multimedia text. In Kramsch et al. (2000) the task given to the
undergraduates, who were learning Spanish, was to create a CD-ROM for
teaching Latin American Culture. In Nelson (2006), the task was digital
storytelling about the students themselves. In both studies, the L2 students
felt that authoring a multimedia text was a more agentive experience
because they had more control over it both as producers and
consumers. Though this literature can prove useful it does not deal with
many of the issues that concern K–12 school systems such as teacher training,
access to computers, task design, which is aligned to school curricula
and exams, etc.
Singapore’s Technology in English project: A recent study
The ‘Technology in English’ (TIE) project undertaken by Singapore’s
National Institute of Education, for which the authors of this chapter are
co-principal investigators (Towndrow et al., 2009), was a year-long pilot
project conducted in 2008, exploring the impact of a one-to-one laptop
program in one of Singapore’s secondary schools. This was a prestigious
middle-class school where the students are taught English and Mandarin
as fi rst languages. The specifi c research objectives relating to this project
concerned how the English language and literature teachers, and their
students, used the technology available in their classrooms, an analysis of
the multimodal texts produced by students, and a survey of the attitudes
of teachers and students toward technology. The study highlighted two
main aspects of language teachers’ use of new media and digital tools.
First, it showed what teachers considered the affordances of wireless digital
technology to be and how these might be designed – in the New London
Group sense – into their work. Second, the study identifi ed the boundaries
and limitations imposed by teachers (again through design decisions) surrounding
language presentation and subsequent production in their classrooms,
via technology.
Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed in the study.
In the quantitative phase of data collection, we surveyed all of the 350
secondary school students (aged 13–14) in one-year level via an online
survey. A modifi ed version of the same survey was administered to the
four English language and literature teachers in the school. In the qualitative
phase of data collection, we video-recorded one unit of lessons for
each of the four English teachers, where a unit was defi ned as a theme or
topic that the teacher covered in approximately one or two weeks. While
one researcher was video recording the lesson, another sat at the back of
the class and coded the lesson using a coding scheme developed by the