Abstract:

The paper focuses on the Multi-reading digital literacy, an expression that synthesizes a new perspective of educational strategy to improve basic-skills in students, such as the reading literacy, and some transversal competences: the creative thought, the critical comprehension and the civicness using digital tools and languages.

The starting point is the learning outcomes of the reading literacy in the OCDE 2009, according to which many European countries are below the average.

The learning quality is connected to the teaching quality, that often corresponds to the adequacy and the effectiveness of teaching strategies adopted to improve these skills. Hence, in the Eurydice report 2012 it is reported that the diversity of reading materials seems to develop the reading proficiency, as well as the crossbreeding of more texts (images, sounds, words and so on) improves the “reading skills”.
In this picture, the cross-media approach can become a strategy to stimulate the perception, the cognition, the emotions and the behaviour of young people, paying attention to the connections among language, meanings and human relationships to construct multilevel-texts, typical of convergent era.

The cross-media behaviour is already widely spread in the consumption of young generations, so it has developed forms of simultaneous thought, based on synoptic inputs organized in chaotic way, and on the de-structuration of syntactic rules of the text. This kind of consumption progressively weakens the reflective, individualized and abstract thought, connected to memorization of knowledge coming from the traditional book.

The cross-media as multi-reading strategy can balance these two thoughts (simultaneous and reflective) through the construction of educational paths on the learning to read, i.e. understanding what you read and using it as a tool for learning. The pupil understands rich and decontextualized knowledge of a word’s meaning, its relationship with other meanings and other words and its extension to metaphorical uses (Beck, 2002). In this way, the cross-media contributes to develop the reading comprehension, that means: “intentional thinking during which meaning is constructed through interactions between the reader and the text” (Harris and Hodges 1995, p.207).

According to this reasoning, the knowledge perspectives not only come from the practice, the experience or technical skills (functional literacy), but from social and cultural capital built from the intergenerational exchange in the educational contexts. Hence, the literacy is transformed, it isn’t only a skill, but it is a critique, that means creative writing, critical reading and aware planning.

Keywords:

Critical literacy, cross-media education, reading literacy, learning to read, simultaneous thought.