AN ONLINE DISCOURSE COMMUNITY OF ADOLESCENT WRITERS

          The convergence of technology and literacy is evident to anyone browsing the World Wide Web or using electronic mail, yet few studies have explored the potential of this emergent context for student participants.  And while adolescents have clearly staked the Internet as part of their culture, educators, researchers, and technology developers are are only beginning to examine the potential impact of such a context on their literacy learning, specifically.  Two prominent areas of promise within this emergent setting are 1) the World Wide Web as a publishing forum; and, 2) using computer mediated communication to establish virtual discourse communities as literacy sites.  These two contexts are examined within TeenLit.com, a web site dedicated to publishing adolescent writing, and eWeb, a smaller online community of adolescent writers.  In the proposed study I aim to capture the essence of this virtual discourse community of adolescent writers publishing on a World Wide Web site.

Teachers continue to struggle with providing authentic audiences and purposes for students' writing; ultimately classroom contexts prove inadequate in reflecting the multitude of complex literacies demanded in today's world.  For educators, the process writing movement brought crucial issues of authenticity and ownership to the forefront yet failed to significantly improve the quality of student writing.  Genre theorists have furthered the powerful tenets of the process writing advocates by highlighting the role of context in determining how language is used, with a view of writing as social action that can be empowering for literacy learners.  Concomitantly developing technologies are daily changing the nature of such literacies, with computer mediated communication and the World Wide Web at the forefront of new demands placed on the reading and writing skills of our youth.  It is at the convergence of such pedagogical needs, learning theories, and technological developments that this study proposes to inform the field of literacy education.

     Central to this study are the concepts of virtual discourse community, genre, and literacy learning.  The virtual discourse community is one in which, "enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (Rheingold, 1993, p. 5).  To examine such a community in development and operation, criteria for a features of a discourse community shall be considered including: common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication and participation, genres, specific lexis, threshold level of members, relevant content, and discoursal expertise (Swales 1990) as well norms, identity, and connections.  In referring to genres, this study will consider both the formal genres of published texts, as well as the communications among members revealed in the speech genres which serve to define how this community functions.  Instances of language use, or individual utterances can be contextualized summarily by field (what is happening), tenor (who is involved) and mode (what role language is playing) (Halliday 1978).  Finally, literacy learning within such a context might include traditional curricular objectives made freshly evident within this context as well as new insights into the unique nature of virtual participation.

          Using micro-genetic analysis based in genre theory and a socio-cultural lens, this case study of an online discourse community of adolescent writers will provide thick description of such a context.  Research questions include:

1)     How does this context function as a discourse community? 

a)     How do elements of technology, design and facilitation serve to shape the online community?

b)     How do participants create and maintain a discourse community?

c)     What literacy learning do participants gain from membership in this online discourse community?

The context of this study is a private online site, eWeb, within broader public World Wide Web site, TeenLit.com.  Participants in the study are a subset of the published adolescent authors on TeenLit.com that have elected to join a smaller, private, identifiable, active group of adolescent writers as facilitated by the researcher.  All communications within eWeb, including postings, electronic mail and chat dialog, will comprise the primary data sources.   Published writing and postings to the public bulletin board of the broader web site will serve to further triangulate the findings.  Following completion of data collection from the site, follow-up interviews shall be conducted with participants to serve as a member check and to further inform the conclusions.  The constant comparative method of analysis will drive the data analysis process.

          Implications from this study should extend to educators, researchers, and technological innovators alike.  For educators, this study will describe how adolescents might utilize such an online forum and how this may be educative.  Such a description is not only informative for curriculum development, but may indeed shed new light on how communities are created, both online and in the classroom.  For researchers, this case study hopes to exemplify genre theory in action within a specific discourse community.  Furthermore, as this study takes place at unexplored borders of literacy and technology, it aims to explore both methodology and theory at these intersections.  Lastly, for technology developers, this study will closely examine how technological design serves to enable or constrain a virtual community.

 

Timeline for Study

Task	Sep99	Oct 99	Nov 99	Dec 99	Jan 00	Feb 00	Mar 00	Apr 00	May 00
Human Subjects Approval
Proposal Defense
Data Collection
Data Analysis
Writing & Revising Dissertation
Dissertation Defense

 

Further readings will include:  Wenger (Communities of Practice), Levin & Rile, Wertsch, Coles (5^th Dimension), and dissertations by Topper, Brice, de Voog, Brock, and Zhao.