3.A sociocultural approach to literacy and its significance for CALL.

3. A sociocultural approach to literacy and its significance for CALL.Warschauer, M. (1997). In K. Murphy-Judy & R. Sanders (Eds.), Nexus: The convergence of research & teaching through new information technologies (pp. 88-97).

This paper discusses the four theoretical traditions; sociocultural theory, discourse theory, literacy theory, and critical pedagogy to a sociocultural approach to literacy. Sociocultural approach is regarded a significance approach for the use of computers in teaching foreign languages, second languages, and indigenous languages.
According to Vygotsky (1978), "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; the first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological)" From this point, the concept that learning to read and write is a social practice rather than an individual skill is made clear. The view of literacy has incorporated social awareness that those who are considered literate in any community are those who have apprenticed into certain social practices. Once literacy is understood as a complex social practice, literacy instruction is viewed as apprenticing students into the discourses and social practices of literate communities. Many approaches have attempted to provide students a combination of collaborative, apprenticeship learning, student-student interaction; expressive talk and writing; epistemic engagement of texts; inquiry into significant questions; and the active role of the teacher as a facilitator, guide, and, when appropriate, expert.
Since literacy cannot be defined as an individual cognitive act, but rather as a social practice, to teach literacy therefore means to apprentice people into the social practices of literate communities. Some essential elements of critical pedagogy should be highlighted in language instruction; for examples, literacy education is rather a process of helping allow students to participate fully in public, community, and economic life; students should have abilities of symbolic analysis, critical thinking, cross-cultural awareness, and meta-linguistic awareness; it also means being able to communicate in more than one language and/or dialect and being able to master a variety of media.

Relevance: In order to study the technology-integrated EFL class, a pedagogical framework in second language learning is needed to be applied. A sociocultural approach to EFL learning is believed to be compatible to the electronic literacy because it draws the connection between learners and the learning environment which includes the society, the IT, and the other language learners. In the view of sociocultural belief, it is suggested that reading and writing involves far more than the simple decoding and coding of text. Rather, literacy is a complex social practice learned through dialogic communication and apprenticeship into literate discourse communities. It involves skills of abstraction, reflection, analysis, interpretation, cross-cultural understanding, collaborative problem-solving, and critical thinking. Computers in and of themselves will not provide any of these, but carefully planned computer-networking projects can provide a valuable support for any teacher interested in enhancing the literacy of students in a foreign, second, or indigenous language.