Textual Authority Metaknowledge Developed In Reports

By Author: Alex Armas
Total Articles: 74
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The preservice teachers' reports also documented how presumptions of textual authority shaped students' engagement with the tasks. The students tended to read the traditional print task very carefully, often considering each word or rereading sentences. One preservice teacher wrote, "With the paper reading, the student ran his finger over all of the words in order not to miss a word and to understand the print." In contrast, the preservice teachers reported that the students seldom read carefully on the Internet, instead quickly scanning search results and webpages to identify if relevant information was presented. Another preservice teacher, Jenn, explained this pattern, stating, "If the students felt uncomfortable with information on a certain site, they just left it and looked for another site that made them feel comfortable."

Most students made quick judgments about the authority of a website. For instance, one student explained why she left one page as soon as she determined it was a blog: "Blog pages are not credible! Blogs are websites MBT Chapa ...
... where people post their opinions." Other students simply selected the link returned first by the search engine and then quickly scanned the website for keywords, often reading only a small portion of the page. Still other students found websites related to scientific organizations that were deemed trustworthy. The key point here is that the preservice teachers saw clear differences in the students' approaches to text; how students approached the text was related to the perceived authority of that text. This metaknowledge of discursive practice was further developed by the observed contrasts of the print text reading and the online reading approaches employed by students.

If we consider traditional print text reading as part of one discursive practice and reading online as part of another (Coiro, 2005; Leu et al, 2004), then we would expect to see differences in student participation. Here, the traditional task was embedded within the discourse of school science and mathematics. Consequently, the students generally aimed to read the print text carefully and to consider each word. In the discourse of online reading, students showed that textual authority MBT Lami was based on types of websites (e.g., blogs, commercial sites, educational institutions) as well as on how successfully the site matched the search terms. One preservice teacher, David, felt that the Internet opened up opportunities for students to become more critical thinkers because the presumption of authority in traditional texts was removed. He found that "when searching for information, [his] student was truly engaged in critically analyzing information and reading with a bit of skepticism. This was in great contrast to how she read the paper-based material earlier."

This comparison of the approaches to text in traditional print and Internet formats provided opportunities for the preservice teachers to develop metaknowledge of how authority shapes practices. The second type of metaknowledge the preservice teachers developed in their investigations concerns the dialogic nature of literacy practices.