Perceptions of Talk, Text, Transactions, and Technology: Preservice Teachers, CMC, and Reader Response
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Date
2009-11-08
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Abstract
AKERS, ANNE TRICE THOMPSON. Perceptions of Talk, Text, Transactions, and Technology: Preservice Teachers, CMC, and Reader Response. (Under the direction of Carol Pope and Carl Young.)
This qualitative study examined middle grades preservice language arts teachers’ perceptions of young adult literature through the lenses of reader response, new literacy, and activity theory. Undergraduate preservice teachers used synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication to respond to three young adult books with their peers in a young adult literature class. Transcripts from their online conversations served as the primary data for this study.
The nature of preservice teachers’ engagement with young adult literature was examined through 11 strategies they used to respond, three stances or purposes for reading they took, and five discussion strategies they used in their literature conversations.
Preservice teachers engaged with the literature on a personal, aesthetic level taking a reader’s stance, but they also responded on an efferent, impersonal level taking a teacher’s or a student’s stance. Personal transactions with the literature were discarded as they moved to discuss the instructional value of young adult literature from an impersonal teacher’s stance. Some preservice teacher responses were unrelated to the literature or to teaching and these were identified as student stances.
Through reader response conversations about young adult literature, preservice teachers incorporated five discussion strategies that shifted the internal, individual process of transacting with a text to an external, social one, extending understandings, reflections, and interpretations of the literature through dialogue with peers.
Computer-mediated communication became a tool for preservice teachers both to transact individually with young adult literature and discuss it socially with each other. Preservice teachers saw value in the technology both for themselves as tools of practice, communication, and reflection and for their future students as tools of motivation, communication, and participation. Computer-mediated communication provided the preservice teachers a student-centered learning environment where they could role play teaching and value their dialogue as making meaning.
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computer-mediated communication; dialogue; literat, educational technology, reader response, new literacy
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Degree
PhD
Discipline
Curriculum and Instruction
