Literacy in the Facebook Era - Waray Dictionary and Language ...

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Fullmer 8 age of English proficiency was somewhere in the past and that young people today do not know English” (p. 73). This is such an unpalatable statistic for many of us to digest that it perhaps requires exploration. I think the reason is simple: students today are exposed to vastly greater quantities of English: movies, music, videoke, television, and perhaps most significant, the internet. All this inundates Pinoy culture with English words. It accounts for the increasing prevalence of Taglish, too, but more importantly it serves to remind us of Stanley Fish’s (1980) theorization about understanding language through “interpretive communities.” Fish argues that we learn how to learn and interpret based on the interpretive strategies we are exposed to. If our interpretive community is small, our interpretive skills will be narrow; if our interpretive community is large, our interpretive skills will be broad. Says Fish, “The ability to interpret is not acquired; it is constitutive of being human. What is acquired are the ways of interpreting” (172-3). In the Facebook Era, I suggest that our interpretive communities are only growing larger, which means that our ways of interpreting are also growing more diverse. Thus, we teachers have reason to hope, to be excited for our students’ ability to learn, in large part due to Facebook. The question, then, is this: what precisely are our students reading and writing outside of class, and how can this knowledge empower us, as teachers of English, to improve students’ fluency? II. Research and Data Given this contextual background, I turn to a qualititative case study: I teach at the Eastern Visayas State University (EVSU), located in Tacloban, a Highly Urbanized City with a population of over 200,000. EVSU’s enrollment for SY 2009-2010 was 9,320. Many students come from neighboring areas of Samar and Leyte, which is generally ranked as one of the most rural areas in the country; average poverty incidence of the region’s 6 provinces is very high at 47.6 in 2006 (Region 8 - Eastern Visayas, 2007). Thus, even though most colleges in the university have computer labs and internet cafes are abundant off campus, there is a wide divergence of internet usage between students. Therefore, to
Fullmer 9 get a sense this population’s online lifestyle, I administered a survey to 77 first-year college students 4 . For context, the results are compared with a 2007 survey of 200 students conducted at Kansas State University in the United States. 5 EVSU KSU What is the average number of students in your classes? 41 115 How many hours do you attend class per week? 39 15 How many hours do you study outside of class per week? 8.4 21 How many hours are you employed per week? 14.6 12.5 How many hours do you use the internet per week? 3.7 17.5 How many books do you read per year? 34 8 How many movies do you watch per year? 111 n/a How many text messages do you send per month? 1,799 n/a What percentage of assigned class readings do you complete? 66% 49% What percentage of readings do you find useful and/or relevant? 84% 26% What percentage of teachers know your name? 38% 18% Before drawing conclusions about what these numbers show, I first provide examples of what students actually write and read on Facebook. Along with the Examples 1 and 2 above, here are three more: Example 3: A student posted this on her Facebook profile, in the form of a chain letter. The origin is unknown. Change your facebook profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday, there should be no human faces on facebook, but an invasion of memories. This is forviolence against children.. 4 These 77 students were enrolled in Developmental Reading in the College of Education, SY 2010-2011. 5 A number of these statistics require explanation. For example, the 115 average class size at KSU is due to the fact that many students enroll in lecture style classes of 200 or more students. Other classes in the university average 20 students; thus the “average” is somewhat misleading. This is similar for statistics about employment, internet usage, and studying: individual responses varied greatly.
Page 1 and 2: Literacy in the Facebook Era A Peda
Page 3 and 4: Fullmer 3 Texting and internet Engl
Page 5 and 6: Fullmer 5 The knowledge of English
Page 7: Fullmer 7 But there is another side
Page 11 and 12: Fullmer 11 III. Analysis With the r
Page 13 and 14: Fullmer 13 But we can apply feminis
Page 15 and 16: Fullmer 15 Application: As homework
Page 17 and 18: Fullmer 17 Obviously, this research
Page 19: Thompson, R. (2003). Filipino Engli

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