iCTLT 2016

Reading development is a critical component of strong language and literacy skills, which are in turn fundamental to young people’s productive participation in the 21st century global knowledge economy. However, teachers observe that students struggle to relate and respond to English language texts on a personal level, much less appreciate the literary merits of these texts. As a result, they often fail to engage deeply and critically in their reading tasks. These, in turn, bear adverse effects not only on students’ competencies in the language and literacy domain, but also their 21st century competencies, including critical thinking and communication, among others.

As part of its third FutureSchool Curriculum Innovation, Ngee Ann Secondary School is developing a web-based, computer-supported collaborative reading and learning diagnostics environment – WiRead. With WiRead, the team aims to explicitly develop students’ critical reading skills, deepen reading engagement levels and promote self-directed and collaborative knowledge construction in the literacy domain, both during and beyond formal classroom time. The tools in WiRead include a web-based, collaborative interactive reading tool, a personal learning dashboard and built-in learning analytics.

WiRead enhances the relevance and authenticity of the formal English curriculum and reading activities to students’ social lifeworlds. The core design of WiRead is underpinned by Vygotskian social constructivist and collaborative learning theories and multi-literacies pedagogical framework. WiRead provides rich, meaningful and timely formative feedback to students and teachers through contemporary learning analytics software to diagnose the social learning and critical reading dynamics amongst students.

WiRead has been used with Secondary 3 students during EL curriculum. They have enjoyed the sessions and have found the data from the learning analytics interesting and useful for their development. Teachers have observed improvement in the students’ quality of talk as well as heightened engagement and motivation. Other learning points include the need for students to increase their average usage to have better learning outcomes.