Publication: Mobile blogging in primary science in Singapore : a linguistic perspective
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Date
2010
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Abstract
Moblogging or mobile blogging is becoming increasing popular in the blogsphere where bloggers can now post their entries complete with a photograph via their mobile phones without having to log on to their computers to access their blogs. While blogging has taken off in the education world where many teachers use blogging as an alternative manifestation of learning, moblogging, the enhanced version of blogging, remains a fairly new educational technology. This study takes a linguistic perspective on educational moblogging by investigating whether language use is affected when mobile phones are used as tools for text production. Investigation was carried out through the textual and visual analysis of moblogging entries documenting the growth of green bean plants individually planted by a class of 39 higher-ability Primary Three Singapore students during their Science lessons. A sample of 100 moblogging entries texted on the mobile phones and sent to the class blog through multimedia messaging service (MMS) by an equal number of boys and girls was examined using Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as the framework of textual analysis. Further investigations were also carried out on the use of scientific lexis and complete subject-verb-object (S-V-O) structures in their entries. Photographs, which accompanied the text in a moblog post taken by students to track the growth of their green bean plants, were examined using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) Visual Grammar Analysis framework which was built upon Halliday’s (1987) SFG Theory. The text and visual analyses were then interpreted together to make sense of how language and visuals were used by the students through moblogging, and hence, shedding light on the multimodality of moblogging. This study seeks to fill a gap in linguistic research on mobile blogging as an emerging technologically-shaped register (Chapelle (2003) in light of a dearth such studies which examine how technology could influence the way language is used in the school context and in a primary Science setting. While results in this study showed that students generally used action processes in text and both narrative and conceptual representational structures in visuals to describe about the growth of their plants as a whole rather than specific parts of the plants, analysis on the congruency between meanings represented revealed that students may lack the ability to harness both text and visuals as semiotics to achieve a common communicative purpose in the creation of multimodal texts like moblog posts. As part of the discussion in this study, a Visual-Text Agreement Framework is proposed to guide educators in teaching Visual Literacy as part of the literacy programme in schools, especially at a time where the education fraternity grapples with the urgent need to review their curriculum in order to prepare students for the communicative demands of the 21st Century.