Undergraduate - UnitATS3680 - Literacies and communication: Education, media and cyberspace

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	Linguistics
Offered	Not offered in 2015
Coordinator(s)	Dr Simon Musgrave

Synopsis

The ability to read and write texts is a core skill we need to live in the modern world. In this unit we look critically at what it means to be literate and the processes by which we develop literacy skills in our first and second languages. A key focus of the unit is exploring how technological changes, such as the advent of twitter and the use of imbedded links on websites might affect the ways in which we process and design texts. We also consider different approaches to teaching literacy skills in schools and universities and the issues of access, power and participation embedded within them.

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit students will be able to:

Deconstruct the skills involved in being literate;
Make informed contributions to public debate on different approaches to teaching literacy to young children and advantages and disadvantages of each approach;
Discuss the demands of academic literacy and how the development of literacy skills varies in first and second languages;
Give detailed comparison of the typical linguist features of at least two different types of texts;
Design and conduct their own ethnographic study of literacy events.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 100%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.