The Role of Digital Literacy Activities in Students' Writing Processes

This study examines the digital literacy activities (DLAs) of students composing on computers to provide detailed, thick description of digital writers’ composing processes. Recent studies of writing processes that involve computers rarely acknowledge that digital composing processes “weave together culture, the individual, and literacy” (Takayoshi “Social Worlds” 551). This study accounts for this gap in research by using digital screen capture (DSC) technologies to study the composing practices of students writing on computers, providing a framework of DLAs writers employ while composing digitally. Besides studying how students engage in DLAs, I study how they value them in an effort to provide context to the information I provide regarding DLAs. The study included twelve participants enrolled in English 102 at a Midwestern R-1 University in the Spring of 2015. Students completed an autoethnography assignment that asked them to learn about their writing processes by studying DSC recordings of themselves writing. Analysis of the DSC footage revealed seventeen DLAs that students engaged in while writing on computers; these DLAs fit into overarching categories of Writing Processes, Utilizing Technologies, and Consulting Resources. This study demonstrated that students employ many literacies while working in computer environments and these literacies mostly help them achieve their goals. This study also reinforced findings that digital writers frequently engage in editing during their generating writing processes but showed new ways that digital composers recursively fit revision into their drafting processes. Students’ written reports in which they shared their perceptions of their DLAs revealed that students’ evaluate their DLAs transactionally, a finding shared by Pigg et al. Finally, this study reveals the ways that DLAs as affordances and constraints help and hinder digital writers when achieving their goals. Moreover, student writers have an underlying awareness of the affordances and constraints provided by digital tools—though they seldom recognize that a DLA that was an affordance at the beginning of their writing processes turned into a constraint at a different point in their writing processes.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Kansas

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Perino, Julie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Reiff, Mary Jo C

• Pedagogy
• Rhetoric
• Web studies
• digital research methods
• digital rhetoric
• digital writing research
• first year composition
• first year writing pedagogies
• writing studies

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright held by the author.

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:18419

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/35683