Using Educational Technology in the English Language Classroom: Module 4

Technology for Teaching Reading

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlE2-ekUHe80XDSS4nUHts1eItBoqKu23

Carol A. Chapelle

Iowa State University

Slide 1. Technology for Teaching Reading. Hello. I’m Carol Chapelle and I’m gonna
be doing the lecture today. Our topic is Technology for teaching reading.

Slide 2. In this Lecture. This lecture consists of six parts. In the first part, we’ll look
at the connection between technology and text today. Then, we’ll meet our
reading expert, Professor Tammy Slater. Third, we’ll ask Prof. Slater to talk about Prof. Carol Chapelle
why reading is important for students and then what teachers should know about
"Professor Carol Chapelle"
reading. We’ll then ask her for some advice for teachers and finally look at how by Iowa State University is
technology can help. licensed under CC BY 4.0

Slide 3. The Technology-Text Connection. Let’s begin by looking at the connection

between technology and text today. Technology provides access to many different materials for
students to read. For example, on the Voice of America website, students can access stories about
current events.

Slide 4. Here is an example of a page from Voice of America, which has news stories that students and
teachers can read and discuss. This particular page appeared shortly after the U.S. presidential election a
few years ago, and it talks about the biggest picture on the page, about President Obama’s trip to
Europe, but other things that are happening around the world are also reported.

© 2019 by Iowa State University. How to Select Reading Texts Lecture Transcript for the AE E-Teacher
Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, except where noted. To view a copy of this license,
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 Voice of America website showing article on President Obama’s trip to Europe

“VoA News” by by VoA Learning English is in the Public Domain.

Slide 5. As you can see in this example, each of the stories that appears on the Voice of America
webpage has written text about the story that students can read and discuss.

Voice of America website’s article on President Obama’s trip to Europe

“Obama Calls on Trump to 'Stand Up' to Russia” by VoA Learning English is in the Public Domain.

Slide 6. The Technology-Text Connection. Because technology provides access to so many different
materials for students to read, teachers can select texts from the Internet for their students. We have
two more examples of texts from the Internet, and again, these come from the U.S. government
website, American English. There are two examples. One is called “Four Friends, Ages 13 and 14,” and
the second is “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

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Slide 7. These two examples can be found at the American English website that all teachers and
students have access to around the world. On that site, there’s a number of resources for teachers. That
middle section called Resources is where I found the two example texts.

American English website and link to resources

"American English For English Language Teachers Around the World" by American English is in the Public Domain.

Slide 8. In the same place, teachers will be able to find different important and useful resources for each
skill for both adults and for children. They can select the appropriate topics for their students by filtering
their search for particular audience ranging from adult learners to young learners as you can see.

Slide 9. By clicking on Resources, I’d find a lot of choices of things to read.

Slide 10. One example is “American Teens Talk!” This is a collection of readings that’s based on
interviews of American high school students in both written and audio format. Each interview is
accompanied by vocabulary notes and discussion questions, so it’s a very useful tool for teaching
reading.

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 American Teens Talk! interviews on American English website

"American Teens Talk!" by American English is in the Public Domain.

Slide 11. Here’s an example of what one of

the interviews looks like from this section of
the text, “Four Friends, Ages 13 and 14.” The
students are pictured there. Those are the
four students who are friends, and they’re
asked questions such as, “What have you
been doing this week? Why are you making
videos? What are you doing in school this
week?” Students can read about what
American students are doing.

Slide 12. Under Resources, I also found the

text of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Slide 13. “The Adventures of Huckleberry

“Four Friends, Ages 13 and 14” segment of American Teens Talk!
Finn” is an American classic that has been
Interviews
simplified in this version so that students are
able to read it. The texts are available on the "Four Friends ages 13 and 14" by American English is in the Public Domain.
website chapter-by-chapter so that they can be
downloaded and used in class.

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 “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on the American English website

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American English is in the Public Domain.

Slide 14. With these types of texts available to students and teachers all over the world, one can imagine
a teacher in Africa looking on the website, finding a chapter of “Huckleberry Finn,” and planning to use it
as part of her teaching materials for the day.

Slide 15. That same teacher in Africa might choose the simplified version of “Huckleberry Finn” from the
American English website, but she also might go to another website. There’s one called the Gutenberg
Project that collects books that have been written and used and enjoyed for many years all in one
website for users to read. Those two websites are just two of the hundreds and thousands of websites
available that have reading materials that might be used for reading classes. With this wealth of
opportunity for reading in English, we need to ask: What should a teacher do? What should a teacher
choose?

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 Project Gutenberg website

This work is a derivative of "Project Gutenberg" by Project Gutenberg. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0
by Iowa State University for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

Slide 16. Meet Our Reading Expert. It is clearly time to bring in our reading expert to talk to us more
about reading and how people learn how to read. Professor Slater researches literacy, which means the
ability to read and write. She taught English speaking in Japan, and there, she discovered the importance
of reading. She found that there was an interplay between spoken and written language. In other words,
they were connected. One helped the other. I asked Professor Slater how she became interested in
reading, and this is what she said.

Slide 17. Meet Our Reading Expert.

Prof. Chapelle: How did you get interested in reading?

Prof. Slater: Well, I’ve always been interested in teaching what we often
call Language Arts in primary and secondary schools, but when I was
working towards becoming a schoolteacher, I fell in love with linguistics,
and that’s the direction my life went in. After finishing a bachelor’s
degree in that subject, I went to Japan to teach English. Much of my
work there focused on oral communication, but what I found really
interesting was the interplay between spoken and written language. At
Prof. Tammy Slater
that time, I was noticing the role of written language in the acquisition of
"Prof. Tammy Slater" by Iowa State spoken language by adults. Students wrote down almost everything new
University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
that they heard so that they could review it and study it and hopefully
learn it. Of course, they frequently wrote down what they heard rather than the correct English spelling,
and they used the Japanese syllabary, their spelling system, to put the words on paper. Of course,
studying it from that system resulted in very strange pronunciations because not all English words follow
the Japanese phonological rule system.

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My own experience trying to learn the Japanese language
really reinforced the differences between reading and
decoding. I found it was quite easy to decode Japanese, at
least when the syllabary was used such as it is in children’s
books and learner textbooks, but this decoding differs hugely
from reading, in which meaning-making plays a critical role. I
was a terrible reader because my vocabulary was so bad. My
prior experiences learning Spanish showed me the same
thing. Whereas I could manipulate the grammar well enough
and decode and pronounce the words very well, I really “Teacher selecting reading text from the internet”
couldn’t read very well. Meaning for me was a huge by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
challenge. These experiences got me thinking about what literacy really is and started me on a path to
study ways to help ESL students hone their literacy skills.

Decoding is part of the literacy process, of course, but literacy is much more the ability to interact with
text, usually written text, with comprehension, and helping students develop literacy, therefore, is
helping them make connections between the text and their own background knowledge or worlds. This
knowledge is knowledge about the content and the world but is also about how language is used to
construct text. In my Japanese experience, I felt illiterate. I could not interact in a way I wanted to. I
could not feel part of the society there. I could not always understand what was happening in other
areas of the world. Thus, I was falling behind as a citizen of the world because of my literacy skills or lack
of them.

Slide 18. Meet Our Reading Expert. Professor Slater shared a useful perspective on reading. She sees
reading as a process of making meaning from text. Professor Slater said students create meaning by
making connections between the text and their own experience, and so, teachers can help students
make those connections by selecting good texts from the Internet. As we saw before, there are many,
many good texts to choose from.

Slide 19. Meet Our Reading Expert. An example of a text that we looked at earlier is “Four Friends.” A
teacher might select this one for young teenagers who are about the same age as those who are in the
interviews in the text. A selection of a text like this, according to Professor Slater, would potentially
allow the readers to connect what they know about their own lives as teenagers with the lives of the
American teenagers. They also might be interested in learning what students of a similar age to
themselves do in the United States.

Slide 20. Why Reading is Important. I asked Professor Slater to talk more about why she thinks reading
is so important for students.

Slide 21. Why Reading is Important.

Prof. Chapelle: Why do you think it’s important to teach reading to students?

Prof. Slater: Nowadays, with the Internet, being able to read in one’s first language anywhere in the
world is much easier, so why learn to read and write in a second language? Culture is constructed trough
language, and if folks are interested in learning about another culture, an obvious way to do it is by
reading words created by people in that culture. In other words, we learn through reading. The more we

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can read, the more we can learn. As we say in English, “Reading opens up a vast world of experience and
adventure.” Reading, as a major part of what literacy is, introduces us to new worlds, new words, and
new ways of looking at ideas. Research has shown that readers have larger vocabularies than non-
readers and in general, can write better. They have had models to follow. Reading in various content
areas can also help us learn language, particularly about the various disciplines, and of course, reading
can be fun because good books provide a major element of enjoyment.

Slide 22. Why Reading is Important. Professor Slater identified several reasons that reading is so
important. She said students learn through reading. They learn about many
different other things. Students can also learn language through reading.
They have the opportunity to see language in use when they read. Also,
because they see the language in use, reading helps them to write better.
Students also can have fun reading, and if they’re having fun, they may
continue reading. The more they read, the more language they see. Students
can also become informed world citizens by reading. We saw the example of
the Voice of America website. Every day, that website has important news
from the United States and around the world. Students who read that
Prof. Tammy Slater website can learn about what’s happening in the United States and in other
countries.
"Prof. Tammy Slater" by Iowa
Slide 23. Why Reading is Important. One important thing that students learn
State University is licensed
under CC BY 4.0
by reading in English is about culture, and teachers can help find and
interpret readings that convey cultural meanings. One good example is “The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn,” the text that we saw earlier that you can find on the American English website. That’s a classic of
American literature. It’s set in the middle of the U.S. on the Mississippi River. It’s a story of friendship,
loyalty, and difficult choices for boys in their early teens. It’s also set many years ago, and so, it has a
historical look at the United States.

Slide 24. What Teachers should Know. I asked Professor Slater what teachers need to know about
reading. She emphasized the connection between reading, writing, and speaking, the importance of
students’ background knowledge, and also some things to think about in selecting texts. Let’s listen.

Slide 25. What Teachers should Know.

Prof. Chapelle: What’s the most important thing for teachers to understand about reading?

Prof. Slater: I think a critical step in helping students develop literacy skills is talking. Just as children
learn about their worlds just by touching and talking long before they begin reading, students need to
talk about what they will be reading about. This is where meanings are constructed and ways of talking
about content or ideas happen. Most contemporary English textbooks incorporate this idea by starting a
unit or chapter with a few questions that aim to get students thinking and perhaps talking about what
they already know about the topic they will soon read about. Without triggering background knowledge
and introducing some of the vocabulary and ensuring that it becomes familiar to the students, reading
becomes difficult or simply a process of decoding without meaning. It’s critical to help students connect
their current understanding to the written text.

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In the initial stages, students can be offered simplified text.
We certainly do that with young native speakers who lack the
content knowledge or the experience to understand an
authentic text. I mean: young children in kindergarten will not
be reading a treatise on nuclear science, but if students are
familiar with the topic and have the knowledge necessary,
offering an authentic text can be very useful and motivating
because as these students work to hone their literacy skills,
they recognize that the written text is representing their world “Students discussing the topic of a reading” by Iowa
knowledge. In other words, they begin to realize that what State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
they are decoding has meaning and interest for them, and this brings me to another key concept in
teaching literacy: encourage students to read whatever is interesting to them and to write something
about what they read. The practice of journaling or writing your own thoughts about what you read is a
great way to practice literacy skills.

Slide 26. What Teachers should Know. Professor Slater emphasized that there’s an important
connection between reading, writing, and speaking.

Slide 27. What Teachers should Know. Let's take a look at how that connection works. When a student
reads something, they’re thinking about it. They’re processing it, and it actually helps them to
understand and remember it if they talk about it with somebody. For example, our student here reading
a book might enter a discussion where she could talk about what she just read. She might say, “I just
read about that, but I disagree with what the author said.” By thinking about it and having an opinion
about what was read, the student develops a better understanding of the reading. In addition, people
often write about what they read and in fact, the reading that they do helps them to formulate their
own thoughts in their own language when they write.

Slide 28. What Teachers should know. Professor Slater also emphasized that teachers can help build
their students’ literacy skills by building knowledge and interest through talking, so for example,
students working together might discuss the topic of a reading and ask each other about their interests
related to that topic. This way, students’ interest becomes activated about the topic of the reading
before they even start to read, and this helps with comprehension.

Side 29. What Teachers should know. Professor Slater also indicated that teachers should help to
trigger background knowledge and to introduce vocabulary before students read. That helps students to
build a schema or an understanding of the topic that helps them to comprehend the text.
Understanding the vocabulary is also useful, of course, because students can better capture the
meaning of what’s being said if they know the words.

Slide 30. What Teachers should know. For example, students that are about to read “The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn” might be introduced to things like the Mississippi River where the story took place,
the idea of the boat, and the camping on the river that is part of the story. Students might learn the
vocabulary for these aspects of the story so that they can think about it before they read. This helps
comprehension.

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Slide 31. What Teachers should Know. The texts that you choose for students to read are important.
Professor Slater talked about authentic versus simplified texts. She said that each of those have specific
purposes for reading instruction. She also talked about the content of the texts. It matters what the
texts are about because an important aspect of reading is students being interested in what they’re
reading.

Slide 32. What Teachers should Know. Professor Slater also talked about authentic versus simplified
texts. Authentic texts contain language that may be too difficult for learners. That’s the language that
was used by the original author of the text, intended for very proficient speakers of English. Simplified
texts, in contrast, contain the same basic ideas, but the language is simpler. Such texts are often created
for learners so that they can have access to the same meaning without having to understand the difficult
texts.

Slide 33. For example, we looked at “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that’s available on the
American English website. This is an example of a simplified text, a text that the authors have rewritten
in a way that would make it easier to read for students.

Slide 34. An American Classic. The simplified text has all the look and characteristics of the authentic
text. It looks like a book that anyone would pick up and read, but in fact, the authors have worked hard
to make the text much simpler.

Slide 35. The same text in its authentic or original form is much more difficult for students to read
because of the language. For example, the first chapter starts:

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth,
mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I
never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or
maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told
about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

In this writing, there are a number of characteristics of the language that is authentic to the time and
the dialect of the characters in the story, but it’s also somewhat difficult to understand.

Slide 36. We can take a look at some of the characteristics of the language just by putting the authentic
text side-by side with the simple text. The first sentence, “You don’t know about me without you have
read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” is simplified to “You don’t know me unless
you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” The change makes the sentence
a more standard English by using “unless” instead of “without” in that position in the sentence. In the
simplified version, the second part of the sentence after the semicolon, “but that ain’t no matter,” is
also simply deleted. That part of the sentence also contains nonstandard use of “ain’t,” and so, the
simplified text has the appearance of a shorter, simpler, or straightforward sentence. That’s one of the
characteristics of simplified texts. Simplified texts have simpler syntax, they have shorter sentences, and
they use more standard English. This allows students to be able to read the story without being
frustrated by the difficult language.

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Slide 37. I found the original version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on the website for Project
Gutenberg which has a collection of original texts of many, many authors and many, many books that
are available for free as e-books. That’s worth taking a look at.

Original version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on Project Gutenberg website

This work is a derivative of "Project Gutenberg" by Project Gutenberg. This derivative is licensed under
CC BY 4.0 by Iowa State University for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.
Department of State.

Slide 38. What Teachers should know. Professor Slater also emphasized the importance of the content
of the text that we choose for students to read.

Slide 39. Advice for Teachers. Professor Slater has already given some important insights into reading,
but I asked her to give us some specific ideas about how to teach reading.

Slide 40. Advice for Teachers. Prof. Chapelle: What advice do you have for teachers about teaching
reading? Prof. Slater: Literacy development is a critical part of learning a
language and of becoming an informed world citizen. It’s more than
decoding; it’s understanding the vocabulary and the grammar and the
patterns that are used to construct texts that fulfill a social purpose in our
world--purposes such as informing, instructing, and even entertaining.
Decoding is easy; reading isn’t. It takes time to develop beyond the
decoding of the ABCs, so when teaching literacy skills, make sure you
involve talk in an enjoyable, fun way prior to having students read and
write. This can be very effective and motivating.

Also, having students keep journals about what they read and, more
Prof. Tammy Slater importantly, what they think about what they read can play a huge role in
developing literacy. Just keep in mind that in literacy development, a
"Prof. Tammy Slater" by Iowa State
University is licensed under CC BY 4.0 journal offers the conversation between the writer, who is typically the
student, and the reader, the teacher. Just as you wouldn’t want to correct
everything a student says, it is important not to correct journals but to respond to them as a
conversation. This also models what good readers often do as they question and ponder the author’s
texts. Finally, make sure you offer students lots of choice of reading materials and encourage them to

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 read, even in their first language, especially if they
are journaling about these texts. As I mentioned,
literacy is all about bringing one’s world knowledge
to the printed page and having the printed page
expand one’s world knowledge.

Slide 41. Advice for Teachers. Professor Slater’s

advice for teachers emphasizes that we should
take into account students’ interests and
knowledge when we choose reading materials.
Each student has particular interests, and part of
“Students engaged in activity related to reading” by Iowa State the process of going through education is to find
University is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and stimulate those types of interests. Reading is a
very important part of that process of stimulating students’ interests.

Slide 42. Advice for Teachers. A related piece of advice is to excite students about reading so that they
feel encouraged to read. Students should enjoy reading in school, and that enjoyment should extend to
outside of class as well when they start finding their own materials to read.

Slide 43. Advice for Teachers. Professor Slater

advised teachers to incorporate reading activities
into fun activities, especially those that include
conversation. Here, she’s talking about linking
reading to speaking, one of the ideas that was
important for her when she started learning
Japanese.

Slide 44. Advice for Teachers. As students engage in

discussion, they should be talking about their
opinions about what they read. This provides
opportunities to become more interested and
challenges them to think critically about what they “Students discussing their opinions about what they read” by Iowa State
read. University is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Slide 45. Advice for Teachers. You can have students

keep journals about what they read.

Slide 46. Advice for Teachers. Overall, we can sum up Professor Slater’s advice as follows: take into
account students’ interest and knowledge in the choice of reading materials. You should try to excite
students about reading, so they feel encouraged to read. The more they read, the better it is for them.
Incorporate reading activities into fun activities that include conversation so that you’re making that link
between the text and the oral language. Engage students in discussion of their own opinions about what
they read so that they are critically engaged with their reading material. Also, have students keep
journals about what they’re reading. That provides them an opportunity to let their reading affect their
writing.

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Slide 47. How can Technology Help? With this background on what we’re trying to do in teaching
reading, we can start to look at some of the technologies that are useful in helping the process of
teaching reading. There are many searching methods for seeking texts and social media sites of interest
to students. These can provide them with materials that are well suited to their level and interest.
Students can be taught to engage in audio blogging or chat to begin topics, activities to build knowledge
and interest in a topic before reading. Sites with good reading about the world, topics that are very
interesting, and American English simplified texts are also a good option. There are also websites for
assessing the readability or the simplicity of texts. Reading groups can be formed based on common
interests within the class, within language learner sites, or within fanfiction sites. Students can engage in
journaling discussion about reading on blogs and forums.

Slide 48. Connecting Reading and Writing. Let’s take a closer look at how we can
connect reading and writing through the use of fanfiction. To do so, we’ll return to
our fanfiction expert, Shannon Sauro.

Slide 49. Fanfiction, Reading & Writing. Hello. This is Shannon Sauro. In this
segment, I talk once again about fan practices, specifically fanfiction and fanfiction
tasks that have been brought into the advanced English language classroom.
Prof. Shannon Sauro Although the examples I’ll discuss here are taken from university students in
Sweden, similar tasks have been designed and adapted for younger students with
"Prof. Shannon Sauro" by
Shannon Sauro is licensed lower English proficiency in middle and high school classrooms.
under CC BY 4.0
Slide 50. Fanfiction. First, a quick reminder about fanfiction, defined here as
"writing that continues, interrupts, reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have
already written about." As this definition indicates, there are many different genres and types of
fanfiction depending on the interest of the writer and the source material. One popular genre among
younger writers is fanfiction where the author inserts themselves as a character in their favorite story. In
other cases, writers might rewrite endings to a story, rewrite an entire story from the perspective of a
different character, or place the characters from one story in an alternate universe. One currently
popular type of alternate universe fanfiction is where fans write about their favorite characters working
at a coffee shop in their hometown. Fan fiction can be of any length. For instance, one type of fanfiction,
drabbles, are short stories that are no more than 100 words long. There are
of course many short stories and also plenty of novel-length fanfiction
stories that are several hundred thousand words long.

Slide 51. The Hobbit. In this presentation, I’ll be talking about fanfiction
based on two different sets of stories. The first is based on The Hobbit, a
fantasy novel written by British author J.R.R. Tolkien set in a world called
Middle Earth inhabited by dwarves, elves, humans, wizards, dragons, and
hobbits.

Slide 52. Sherlock Holmes. The next set of texts are the Sherlock Holmes
mysteries. Sherlock Holmes is a London-based, famous fictional private
detective who was created by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and

appeared in detective novels and short stories between 1887 and 1927. The Hobbit

"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" by

The_JIFF is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Slide 53. Context and Participants. The context where these fanfiction tasks take place is a course on
teaching literature required for students specializing in teaching English at the secondary school level in
Sweden. Students are in either their first or third term of study of a five-year undergraduate program.
The two fanfiction projects described here were designed to serve as a possible model of tasks that
these future teachers could use with their own students.

Slide 54. The Blogging Hobbit. The first project is called The Blogging Hobbit, a task-based fanfiction
project culminating in the writing of a collaborative story of a missing moment from Tolkien’s The
Hobbit and published in a blog or online fanfiction archive. For this project, students were organized into
groups of three to six and asked to carry out a series of subtasks that resulted in the publication and
presentation of a story depicting a missing moment. Each student was required to contribute at least six
paragraphs to their group story and to write from the perspective of one character from The Hobbit.
This required careful attention to the character’s way of speaking and behaving. The overall project
consisted of four parts: (1) the creation of a map and outline to guide each group in their writing, (2) the
published collaborative story, (3) an individual reflective essay in which students wrote about linguistic
and literary choices they attended to, and (4) a group oral presentation on the process. The resulting 31
stories ranged in length from 2,000 to just over 16,000 words.

Slide 55. In their reflective papers, the majority of

students identified ways in which the collaborative
fanfiction task enhanced their language learning at
the lexical level. In particular, several pointed out
that mimicking the language of The Hobbit
required them to understand and use words that
were more old-fashioned or formal than they were
used to using. As one student wrote, “this writing
activity has influenced my language skills. During
this project, I have been able to expand my
repertoire of English words which are not so
commonly used in everyday English anymore.”
Lexical development was identified by a range of Hobbit Hole
students including those who identified as more "File:Hobbit Hole.jpg" by Flickr upload bot is licensed under CC BY 2.0

proficient in English and found that imitating the

writing style in The Hobbit allowed them to expand their vocabulary, particularly with respect to
adjectives and adverbs which they found characteristic of Tolkien’s writing.

Slide 56. Some students who identified as non-readers of fiction described how the task in particular led
to the development of vocabulary or grammar knowledge useful for creative writing: “I am not that
much of a reader of fiction compared to others, and I feel that my vocabulary had increased when it
comes to creative writing.” Beyond discrete vocabulary item learning, more than a third of all students
felt that the collaborative writing task improved their ability to write in English. Most of them
emphasized development in the area of creative writing in particular because they had little to no
experience with creative writing, while others identified an improvement in overall writing fluency. As
one student said, “After a short while, the writing became very fluent, and I did not have to think too
hard before writing.” In addition, a few self-identified weaker writers described an overarching

14
improvement in their writing accuracy, which they attributed to the peer feedback they received during
the collaborative writing process.

Slide 57. Careful reading to accurately capture the voice of their particular character was commented on
by more than half the students. For some students, this took the form of trying to capture the
character’s idiosyncratic speech style which included a fondness for riddles but also grammatically
incorrect speech, which we can see an example of here on the screen. Another student wrote this about
his character: “I really tried to make Gollum’s language from the movies work together with the features
specific to the book. He does speak grammatically incorrect, and that was a bit tricky to make work as of
making him understood.” The student went on to point out one of the advantages of the assignment,
though: “I have not worked in this way before with reading and writing, where you tend to go back to
your book like a dictionary to highlight special features from your character.”

Slide 58. One of the questions I’m often asked about classroom fanfiction is how good it is or how it
compares to the fanfiction fans write online. To investigate this, I did a keyword analysis, a type of
corpus-based analysis that looks for keywords that appear with unusual frequency in one group of texts
compared to another. One can also look for negative keywords or words that are unusually infrequent in
a corpus compared to another. In order to do this, I compiled a corpus of online fanfiction from the
fanfiction site Archive of our Own (Ao3) that was written during the same period as my students’
fanfiction, was similar in length and rating, and was a similar genre. In other words, no explicit stories,
no romance, or no alternate universe stories.

Slide 59. Keywords. Among the keywords found in

the classroom fanfiction were third-person plural
pronouns we, our, us. This was a reflection of the
fact that the classroom fanfiction was written by
multiple authors and conveyed multiple perspectives
and thus plural pronouns were common. Certain
character names were also keywords, including
several dwarves who were not as commonly
referenced in the online fanfiction. In addition,
keywords included reference to a number of
different beings found in Middle Earth, including
Keywords
dwarves, goblins, wizards, and elves.
This work is a derivative of "Blogging Hobbit Wordle" by Wordle.net, used
Slide 60. Negative Keywords. In contrast, the under CC BY 2.0. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by Iowa State
negative keywords, the words that were particularly University for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.
Department of State.
uncommon in my students’ fanfiction compared to
the online fanfiction, included third-person singular pronouns (she, her, his, him), kinship terms,
character names, and contracted forms. Taken together, these negative keywords pointed to a
difference in character focus, including a focus on individual characters, including an original female
character only found in the Hobbit films and not in the novel, a greater emphasis on family or family
relationships, and more reference to certain elves as opposed to dwarves. However, most notably, the
contracted forms, when investigated in the corpus, typically occurred in dialog, revealing that classroom
fanfiction, perhaps because of the assignment focus on character perspective, had much less dialog than
the online fanfiction.

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 Slide 61. A follow-up interview with a focus group of fans and non-fans in one particularly eager group
who called themselves The Dream Team also pointed to another major difference between the
classroom fanfiction and the online fanfiction. According to one student, B, “Fanfics that get really
popular, they kind of answer to some kind of fantasy that people have about the characters. Or
something they really want to explore. Or they create an alternate universe. We didn’t have anything
like that, really. I mean, I think ours was very kind of very much like the book in a way, so maybe it
wasn’t as exciting as some other fanfiction because it wasn’t innovating in that way. We were trying to
make it look like it could actually be a part of the book. So I think that’s the difference as well between
what we did and we planned and what’s on fanfiction forums.” In other words, the instructions for the
classroom fanfiction did not allow students to be quite as innovative as actual fanfiction.

Slide 62. A Study in Sherlock. This led to the second fanfiction project, A Study in Sherlock. Based on
input from students, we moved from The Hobbit to the Sherlock Holmes stories and gave students more
options to be innovative. Because the Sherlock Holmes stories were mysteries, they were all required to
follow the genre of detective fiction and to have Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery. The fanfiction was
still to be written collaboratively in groups of three to six, but students were encouraged to be more
innovative. They could tell a new mystery in the original universe of the stories, Victorian London, or
they could tell a new mystery or retell an old one in an entirely different alternate universe. In
preparation, students participated in in-class fanfiction writing workshops and were assigned to read
examples of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction in addition to several actual Sherlock Holmes stories.

Slide 63. The Fanfiction. The resulting 16 pieces of fanfiction stories were on average 5,726 words long.
Ten were published to private blogs, and six were published to the fanfiction archives, Archive of our
Own or Fanfiction.net, with the hope of perhaps eliciting feedback and responses from actual online
fans.

Slide 64. Innovation in the stories took several forms. There were
several set in Sweden, including this one, The Hound of the
Northern Lights, which was a retelling of the Sherlock Holmes
mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles but was set in northern
Sweden. Students collaborated to find a way to Swedify the
story, changing characters’ names. For example, the Baskervilles
became the Baskerströms, but also imagining ways two
Englishmen like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would make
sense of Swedish customs and behavior as they went about
solving a mystery far north inside the Arctic Circle. The Hound of the Baskervilles "Hound of the
Baskervilles" by matt hutchinson is licensed under CC
Slide 65. Other groups innovated by BY 2.0
setting the Sherlock Holmes characters
inside another universe they were fans of or were more familiar with. One
example of this was the story Nowhere to Hyde which imagined Sherlock and John
in the 1960s as characters in the cartoon series Scooby Doo, a cartoon about a
group of young people, The Mystery Gang, and their dog, Scooby Doo, who solve
crimes. This mixing of universes allowed students who were less interested in
Sherlock Holmes to find a way to engage with the project. As one student wrote,

Scooby Doo

"scooby_doo_pic a" by spadge6868 is licensed

under CC BY 2.0
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“My interest in Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes world is still at an intermediate level.

On the other hand, my knowledge of the Scooby Doo universe is far greater, and I could enter that verse
much easier than the universe of Sherlock Holmes. As a child, I loved the characters of the Mystery Gang
and therefore, I really enjoyed this task.”

Slide 66. Once again, the writing of fanfiction led to vocabulary development. In particular, many
students commented on the challenge to their vocabulary or variety of English. As one student
explained, “First off, I am highly Americanized in my English use, and I blame Hollywood. It’s been a
welcomed challenge to write in British. My biggest inspiration has once again been the BBC show. I truly
enjoyed using the word ‘foggiest’ in a text, and it is now a part of my vocabulary. My American is being
invaded. ‘The British are coming!’”

Slide 67. On a final note, this fanfiction project also helped some students develop a deeper awareness
of literary techniques, which they were able to identify in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries to
apply to their own stories. Here is one student’s reflection which highlights the close relationship
between language and storytelling that she became aware of: “Doyle writes also quite linear with
Watson’s first-person narrative, which contributes to maintaining the suspense, since Watson, as a
limited narrator, is many times as clueless as the reader is, which I tried to keep in mind at all times. I
also tried to give my writing a variable rhythm, slowing it down with descriptions sometimes, and
speeding it up with action verbs at other times.“ These specific examples show how fanfiction can be
integrated into classroom teaching for the purpose of language development and literary learning by
requiring a close connection between reading and writing.

Slide 68. Technology for Teaching Reading. I hope this lecture gave you some ideas for how technology
is used today for teaching reading. We’ll have a chance to work on those a bit more with activities for
this week’s lesson.

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