Reading in the age of the internet

Abstract

Introduction to the special issueReading has changed with consumer adoption of digital technologies, and its changes are many: from the new ways in which users of such technologies can now access texts to the opportunities those users now have for discussing them online. Given technological developments, changes in behaviour may seem inevitable. However, for researchers investigating reading and interpretation in the internet age, questions remain, as they do with any social activity online, about whether 'new' practices are indeed new, and about how they are inflected through mediation on the internet (Herring, 2004). How researchers -and particularly those interested in the interaction of readers with texts and of readers with one another around texts -can uncover, describe, and analyse these changes is an important emerging topic. The articles in this issue make an attempt to offer methods for investigating how the internet and associated technologies affect reading. They look in particular at how readers reproduce, appropriate, and subvert traditional practices for reading and interpreting texts in online environments. The connection between the global and local, as Androutsopoulos (2010) has shown, is dynamic and complex, with local practices and readings by individual readers influencing global practices, and global readings in public forums influencing individual readings. The effects of the connections between readers that the internet facilitates are not homogeneous, but instead manifest themselves in different online locations and forums, through different technologies, and with shifting cultural trends. The internet has offered readers new ways to interact with texts and with other readers, but how these technologies have changed behaviour and what effect these changes have on the practices of reading and interpretation is still largely unknown.At the same time as making a start on the important task of finding out how the internet matters for reading and interpretation, this special issue contributes to several 652781L AL0010.

Activities to Anticipate the Weaknesses of Students’ Reading Materials From Internet

“…This online reading can lead to further activities. Allington & Pihlaja (2016) show the shift from printed texts to e-texts together with the online interpretative practices. Not only the reading online materials, the discussion of the reading materials can also be done online.…”

Affordances, complexities, and challenges of intercultural citizenship for foreign language teachers

“…In turn, translanguaging challenges a static focus on language systems (Canagarajah, ; Larsen‐Freeman, ; Taylor & Snoddon, ). Digital literacies (Allington & Pihlaja, ; Hafner, Chik, & Jones, ) and new multimodal literacy practices (Meyer et al, ; Rowsell, ) are important and align with “expansive notions of literacy” (Rowsell, , p. 2). Intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship can therefore be associated with new conceptualizations of literacy (Allington & Pihlaja, ; Hackett, Pahl, & Pool, ; Larson et al, ; Rowsell, ).…”

“…Digital literacies (Allington & Pihlaja, ; Hafner, Chik, & Jones, ) and new multimodal literacy practices (Meyer et al, ; Rowsell, ) are important and align with “expansive notions of literacy” (Rowsell, , p. 2). Intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship can therefore be associated with new conceptualizations of literacy (Allington & Pihlaja, ; Hackett, Pahl, & Pool, ; Larson et al, ; Rowsell, ). In this sense, intercultural citizenship offers affordances to teachers in the face of globalization, the technology revolution, and the rise of artificial intelligence, and the challenges they pose to education and employment.…”

A reader response method not just for ‘you’

“…Despite the limitations of each approach, recent discussions about the value of empirical research for stylistics have been more open to a range of methodologies and methods. In the introduction to a special issue of Language and Literature on ‘Reading in the Digital Age’, Allington and Pihlaja (2016: 205) state that ‘this special issue is motivated by the conviction that diverse methodological approaches can and should be brought together to understand reading and interpretation’, thus recommending an inclusive approach to empirical literary study. In their special issue, ‘Stylistic Approaches to Reader Response Research’, Whiteley and Canning (2017: 72) similarly encourage the use of both experimental and naturalistic methods, but they also argue that the way empirical research is used in stylistics is distinctive.…”