Computer-Supported Scaffolding of Literacy Development

Abstract

This study examined the relative efficacy of electronic versus hard-copy textual environments in supporting students' acquisition of vocabulary. Forty-six Grade 5 students were randomly assigned to 4 Aesop's Fables that had been equated in terms of difficulty, with the constraint that each student would read 2 texts in each condition. Scaffolding in the electronic condition was provided by an online monolingual English dictionary while a dictionary from the school library was used in the hard-copy condition. In the electronic condition students could carry out practice exercises (based on cloze procedures) focused on the words they did not know while in the hard-copy condition, students simply wrote down the unknown words and tried to remember their meaning. The 2 conditions were equally effective in supporting students' acquisition of new vocabulary, both with respect to immediate and delayed retention. It is suggested that computer-supported approaches to academic language learning might benefit from a multimodal approach that included paper-and-pencil activities, such as keeping a notebook log of new vocabulary, in addition to any practice exercises carried out on the computer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The research reported in this article was carried out with funding (2002–2006) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Principal investigator is M. Early and the project is titled From Literacy to Multiliteracies: Designing Learning Environments for Knowledge Generation within the New Economy (seewww.multiliteracies.ca).