Talk Around Digital Texts: A Microethnographic Analysis of Learner Challenges

Digital, web-based texts as a resource for the classroom present new ways of making meaning as learners draw on a wide range of communicative resources such as gaze and gesture to access and read them. This study employed a multimodal interaction analysis framework to examine an English language class of Japanese university students explaining online video stories face-to-face in a university in Japan. The findings identified a gap in the digital literacy skills the teacher assumed the learners possessed and the actual digital literacy skills required for successful completion of the classroom activity. The findings challenge the assumption that young learners are ‘digital natives', being capable of using technology for the specific purposes required in the class task. Implications for the planning and implementation of digital media for talk in language classroom tasks are discussed.