Page 152 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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of the specific skills that govern the produc- tion of oral discourses that are appropriate to different communicative situations, coherently organise the content, and are cohesive.
• Written expression, which is the basis for producing a variety of written texts that are suited to a broad range of communicative situations, coherent with the organisation of their content and textually cohesive, as well as formally correct.
• Oral interaction, which is the basis for interpersonal dialogue and has specific fea- tures linked chiefly to shared negotiation of the meaning and to respect for the norms of socio-communicative environments.
Without a doubt reading, writing and the ability to speak and listen weave webs that structure literate societies. These skills are particularly valuable in today’s society undergoing the transition to digital – not in isolation, however, but as pieces that fit together to form a whole.
This ideal reader we pursue is woven from
these strands: a multimodal and multiplatform reader who understands what he reads, does so critically, and is capable of making inferences, of building his own messages with coherent reason- ing and of transmitting them effectively using writing, other codes or oral speech. Reading thus gradually shapes us in different ways and helps us “think ourselves” and “think” the world. As Alberto Manquel states, “to be deeply human we need to be thinkers and readers”.145
Thinking and listening are the mortar that binds reading and lends solidity to acts of communi- cation. Curiosity as a driving force and questions as a point of departure complete the equipment needed to cope successfully with the intense flows of information in our day-to-day affairs.
All these verbs – “transitive and plural”, to quote Daniel Cassany146 – need to be conjugated on
paper and in digital form as the people who practice them need to be familiar with and use all the media and know how to combine and compare them. In this respect they are more valuable skills than in previous periods, though they are also more complex and difficult to put to use.
The diversity of reading and writing situations is very considerable and literary practices are linked by a varied and interesting range of reading
and writing practices closely related to people’s lives. These practices are particularly relevant to young people, as Cassany points out when he describes a few of them which combine writing, reading and orality in the digital environment:
They write in new situations: they chat via
MSN, they send each other SMS messages, post blogs and “make friends” on Facebook. They are immediate, spontaneous, somewhat interactive exchanges with a certain resemblance to speaking and tremendously different from school essays. They read and write at the same time in very different situations, displaying great technical skill: they have many windows open on their screen and “jump” from one to another to reply to a friend they are chatting to, check their mail or post their status on Facebook; they also “copy and paste” fragments of text from one window to another when they use an automatic translator, gather information from Wikipedia and insert a link from one place to another. As well as mastering lan- guage, they have developed important computing skills.147
Indeed, today’s environment is fostering the development of social skills in relation to group writing and working in a spontaneous manner; communities of writers are springing up based around a literary work, a genre or issues that are interesting in other aspects. The interaction that takes place between people who participate reg- ularly or occasionally in these expression groups encourages a high degree of collaboration and cooperation between them.
STRATEGIES/APPROACHES FOR GIVING IMPETUS TO READING
Readers in the digital age