Electronic Literacy Development From School To Workplace: A Process Evaluation

The fast development of world economy and information technology has brought forth the increased applications of computers and the Internet in education. Notions of literacy in language education have been expanding its spectrum in this new era. Apart from traditional reading and writing skills, electronic literacy (e-literacy) now contains a wide range of computer-related language skills (Warschauer, 1996, 1999; Reinking, McKenna, Labbo, & Kieffer, 1997). E-literacy begins to be regarded as a necessary ability of language users either at school or in their future job. It accords with the national call for cultivating talents with comprehensive qualities in China It also meets the need of recent campaign for technology integration in college English education to establish a solid foundation for learners' personal and professional development .By conducting a process evaluation on the e-literacy that the former English majors developed in the two CALL projects in Suzhou University and the application of these new literacies in their current workplace, this paper aims at understanding the impact of the CALL programs on the process of the student e-literacy development from school to workplace, so as to gain some useful implications for improving the design and implementation of CALL programs in Suzhou university as well as other universities facing the same challenge. The three e-literacy categories derived from Hill's (2000) definition of English-based Digital Literacy and Warschauer's (2002) Electronic Literacy are employed as the base of the theoretical framework of this study. They are communication literacy, information literacy and multimedia literacy.Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been employed in this process evaluation. The quantitative data are obtained from an e-literacy development and application survey of 30 former English majors in Suzhou University. The statistic operation is conducted to see if there is any statistically significant change in the e-literacy development and application. Meanwhile, data-based open-ended questions, interviews, the participants' writing samples and the former project tutors' observation notes are collected and analyzed in order to gain insights into the process of e-literacy development and application. The major evaluation results can be summarized as follows:1. Generally speaking, the participants' e-literacies get developed in the authentic and interactive CALL projects, where English learning and e-literacy development get overlapped in a natural way. But participants' multi-leveled language proficiency and basic computer literacy mark their different degrees of e-literacy development.2. Most of the e-literacies that participants learned and practiced during the CALL projects in Suzhou University are well applied in their current work or postgraduate study. However, participants' varied working contexts and requirements lead to different degrees of e-literacy applications in their current workplace or graduate study.Based on the above findings, the thesis draws some implications for improving the design and implementation of such CALL programs in Suzhou University, including cross-cultural communication, online reading and research, computer-assisted writing for authentic purposes and expanding media use for presentation. It is also the writer's hope that issues raised in this study will likely be applicable to other schools facing the same challenges so as to help students develop their e-literacy for their future professional and personal development.