Conclusion and pedagogical implications
From a socioconstructivist perspective (Bruner, 1984; Vygotski, 1962), texts are a meeting point between the sociodiscursive representations of teachers (and the pedagogical transfers that teachers make of them) and those of learners. Such representations are psicopragmatic schemas, which derive from the discursive activity of speakers in a specific sociocultural formation. In the francophone tradition, such paradigm accounts for the fact the the research on textual typologies and discourse genres has been widely applied to language teaching, as illustrates the Pratiques journal, where both researchers on text linguistics and language teachers have been publishing jointly for more than twenty years. In the anglosaxon tradition, research on discourse genres has inspired a high numbers of pedagogical proposals, specially in the field of English for Academic and Professional Purposes. Journals such as Applied Linguistics or ELT Journal , among others, include a high number of contributions that illustrate clearly the twofold theoretical and applied dimension of genre research.
When engaging in linguistic analysis of digital genres with a pedagogical purpose, language teachers should take into account that, although existing genres are a reference frame to explain the emergence of new genres, such new genres can only be accounted for as the result of a transformation process, enabled by the affordances of the new media, as Lemke (2003) clearly describes:
Genres are not what they used to be. They are both more and less. More in the sense that today many genres of interest are increasingly multimodal, making their meanings through the codeployment of resources from both language and other semiotic systems. Less in the sense that as people cross institutional and genre boundaries on shorter and shorter timescales (surfing across television channels from genre to genre, across websites from institution to institution, and living their lives between as well as within multiple jobs, tasks, and institutions), we increasingly not only hybridize formerly insulated genres, but we now also make meaning along our traversals across traditional genres. Genres are becoming units, raw material, for flexible trans-generic constructions: resources for meaning in a new, externally-oriented sense. Looking at genre from these contemporary viewpoints provides insights into the phenomenon of genre from new functional perspectives.
Regarding the pedagogical framework, as Jeanne-Marie Debaisieux observed at the 2004 TAAAL Conference, there is a multiplication of resources, a multiplication—at least potentially—of expert “advice”, an amplification of contacts among peers (other learners) and with native speakers. Each one of these amplifying movements forces us to adopt new thinking strategies ( Villanueva , 2006):
Bearing these premises in mind and after the pre-pedagogical analysis carried out in previous sections in this paper, we might conclude that the analysis of the specificity of digital genres provides a new perspective for the development of a new integrated competence that we call wreading. The wreading competence takes into account the features that are inherent to the new digital genres such as duality of structure, multimodality, multisemiotics, multigenericity, transgenericity, diversity of intended audience, and non-linearity of content.
With the purpose of helping students develop the wreading competence necessary in the Cybergenre Age, we take the webquest model (Dodge, 1995; March, 1997; Luzón, 2002) as the general framework to design language learning tasks. However, in order to promote an autonomising wreading competence, these tasks should be designed in such a way that they enable language learners to develop cognitive, metacognitive and intercultural strategies in all the different types of communication afforded by the new medium.
In order to meet these requirements, the training in the new literacy of wreading should be approached from a processual perspective that affords the introduction of new types of specific abilities which are necessary in the Cybergenre Age. Some examples of these abilities might be the following: the ability to evaluate a Webpage according to one’s goals and source credibility, the ability to relate and meaningfully use information in different semiotic codes (i.e., multimodality), the ability to move from the reading to the browsing and navigation modes in the different stages of the webquest (i.e., selection of webpages or websites, selection of specific information from a webpage, decisions on the use of external or internal links, etc.), the ability to evaluate the process and the result, taking into account, among others, criteria on webpage navigability (i.e., technical aspects, help options, traces left in the webpage), navigational strategies depending on the website architecture, usability criteria (relation with the context and task), language learning criteria.
In this new context, it is necessary to facilitate the development of specific skills where reading and writing competences meet to become an integrated wreading competence: (i) technical skills of information elaboration and management; (ii) linguistic and semiotic skills; (iii) cognitive skills, and (iv) metacognitive skills. Technical skills of information elaboration and management include, for instance, the ability to identify the relevant information on a specific website, recontextualise it according to one’s goal and audience, and eventually transmit it by means of different synchronous and asynchronous communication tools; Linguistic and semiotic skills include the identification of the different communicative purposes and the possible audiences of a webpage or site, the awareness of linguistic and cultural variety, the ability to relate different semiotic codes with different purposes, or the ability to use information from different webpages and sites, which might have employed diverse generic options, among others. Cognitive skills include, for instance, categorising and linking information or finding a balance point between the urge to action and reflection in order to make effective use of the immediacy afforded by ICT. Finally, metacognitive skills include, for instance, learning to evaluate the shifts between navigation and reading modes according to the characteristics of the webpages and to the task goals, learning to evaluate hypotheses when using the links, and the results obtained, establishing different criteria in order to evaluate the language learning process (e.g., the ability to use online resources, ability to use different reading strategies, ability to identify generic echoes in the new digital genres, ability to use multimodality in order to understand and transmit a message).
Furthermore, the introduction of ICTs in the language learning field requires new approaches to autonomy training, since technology itself does not generate autonomous behaviour in users/learners. These autonomising approaches should be based upon pedagogical premises such as learning how to manage complexity, developing critical and creative thought or learning how to manage interaction and interculturality. Such pedagogical premises will be the base for the design of an experimental study in which students’ navigational behaviour (n=100) will be observed and analysed. In order to do so, we will use the results obtained from the present descriptive and analytical study to design specific language learning activities (Languagequest-like) which will take into account specific features from the nature of digital genres and autonomous language learning skills. The results obtained from students’ performance will be related to their cognitive styles, ICT skills and learning styles.
NOTE: The research carried out for this paper is part of a R+D Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Cybergenres and Technologies Applied to Autonomous Language Learning. Study of the Strategies and the Pragmatic and Cognitive Models in the Production and Processing of Digital Genres. Code: HUM2005-05548/FILO).