Abstract:

Traditional literacies such as reading and writing continue to be crucial skills, but on their own they are not sufficient to achieve success in today’s globally digital environment. Indeed, for teachers to equip pupils with today’s increasingly crucial 21st century skills, appropriate learning and teaching approaches which are supported by emerging technology-enabled pedagogical models need to be developed. Supporting this aim of redesigning pedagogies and developing new strategies, research has shown that harnessing the affordances of mobile technologies has the potential to revolutionalize the advancement of 21st century skills such as new media literacies, collaboration, communication and global awareness. This research paper presents findings of an action research study conducted in a class of Primary 5 pupils, investigating the multimodality effects of mobile technologies on metacognitive reading comprehension instruction with a view to informing future framework adoptions to mobilized learning task designs and recommendations for assessments.

The purpose of the study and lesson redesign phases was to inform pupils about metacognitive reading strategies that promote deeper understanding. Strategic instruction was provided to cover the essential reading strategies under the English Language syllabus. Three elements of Activity Theory; learner, learning task and learning output were used to analyse these 3-phased redesigned lesson plans. In addition, consideration was given to the Levels of Technology Use developed by Puentedura (2006) as well as Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK) to provide an analysis of the change in learning designs in the study, all of which with the affordances of mobile technologies in consideration. These indicators provided me with guidelines to study changes in learning designs from traditional lesson plans to alternative ones as I sought to identify and reflect on significant findings supporting customization and personalization in my pupils’ reading and understanding.

The learning opportunities of the mobile technology in focus would then bring to light the potential of learning tasks to impact the learning and social affordances gained by pupils. The study ends with recommendations concerning task design principles, assessments and future framework adoptions to mobilize learning task designs in other contexts.

Keywords:

Curriculum Design, Metacognition, Multimodality, Mobile learning, Reading Comprehension.