Exploring Digital Literacy Practices via L2 Social Reading

Abstract

This exploratory study analyzes the digital literacy practices that resulted from learner-learner interactions within a virtual environment when collaboratively reading eighteen Spanish poems via a digital annotation tool over a four-week period in a college-level Hispanic literature course. Using an ecological theoretical perspective and centering on the affordance construct (van Lier, 2004), we investigate how linguistic characteristics of the poems affect the nature of learners’ annotations and also analyze how learners’ written comments/annotations change over time when engaging in L2 social reading. Findings suggest that when the lexical diversity of the poems increased, the number of literary affordances that emerged in learners’ annotations decreased. Statistical analyses also revealed that the total number of errors and the lexical diversity of learners’ written annotations did not change when looking at the class as a whole. However, change in writing was noted at the individual learner level. We conclude with a number of pedagogical suggestions regarding the incorporation of digital social reading in L2 environments and offer future avenues for research in this nascent area.