Language Games, Digital Writing, Emerging Literacies: Enhancing kids' natural gifts as narrators and notators - Papers & Essays

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Language Games, Digital Writing, Emerging Literacies: Enhancing kids' natural gifts as narrators and notators

Summary:

Children express themselves in a "hundred languages" (Malaguzzi & Al., 1987). They speak in gestures, words, images, and they use whatever they know in one language as a means to understanding others. Children also mix-and-match expressive media, such as drawing, writing, or acting. This paper focuses on the paths that bring the growing child to literacy: from being a narrator to being a notator, from being a listener to being a reader. While this is a fascinating journey, it is also a hurdle to many children. The contention of the paper is that digital technologies can be instrumental in helping youngsters bridge the gap between oral and written communication, and mediate their expressions in novel ways. Digital media and narrative-based environments offer new grounds to re-assemble and re-contextualize text, and to link voice to word and author to audience. Manipulating "programmable" story-bits to create story lines (edit speech) and, conversely, engaging in written dialogues with remote pals, or fictional interlocutors (write to speak) are some of the promising venues that I explore in this paper.

Keywords:
Language games, digital writing, literacy, narrative competence, (con)text.
Japanese
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Ackermann, E. (2002). In (Dimitracopoulou, A., Ed.) "Information and CommunicationTechnologies in Education". Proceedings of 3rd Hellenic Conference, with internationalparticipation, 26-29/9/2002, University of Aegean, Rhodes, Greece, Kastaniotis /Interactive, Volume 1, pp. 31 - 38. [An extended version of the paper appears in Ackermann E. (2001). Bambini Digitali, Strumenti narrativi, scrittura dialogica. In .TD.Tecnologie Didattiche, n.24, numero 3, 2001, pp..24-48.]

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