In this study, I investigated the print exposure and website exposure of undergraduates in relation to their scores on a text comprehension test. Print exposure was measured with a national version of the author recognition test, whereas a new website recognition test was developed to measure students' exposure to texts on the internet. The…

Last year, the author and his ninth-grade students explored ways to use mobile media devices such as iPods and cell phones to help guide literacy practices in their English classroom. Their school, South Central High School (SCHS; a pseudonym), is a public high school located in urban Los Angeles. As part of their seven-week exploration, the…

Although wired classrooms are now commonplace, the online tools available to teachers and students are changing more rapidly than ever. However, not all online tools are alike. With the proliferation of the World Wide Web and the advent of Web 2.0, which unlike Web 1.0 enables collaboration and manipulation of online texts, teachers must…

Findings from this study of how two pairs of eighth-grade students each transacted with a website during think-aloud sessions at the conclusion of a curricular unit on Mexico and migration highlight the ways the students engaged in three interrelated tasks: (1) Identifying and making sense of "new" information; (2) Evaluating claims and evidence;…

The purpose of this theoretical essay is to explore the limits of traditional conceptualizations of reader and text and to propose a more general theory based on the concept of a literacy agent. The proposed theoretical perspective subsumes concepts from traditional theory and aims to account for literacy online. The agent-based literacy theory…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how 23 fourth-grade students with different writing abilities translated their teacher's literacy instruction into an understanding of audience awareness when writing for Internet publication. As part of their classroom literacy instruction, students learned the textual features indicative of different…