Computer-Supported Scaffolding of Literacy Development

Abstract

This study examined the relative efficacy of electronic versus hard-copy textual environments in supporting students' acquisition of vocabulary. Forty-six Grade 5 students were randomly assigned to 4 Aesop's Fables that had been equated in terms of difficulty, with the constraint that each student would read 2 texts in each condition. Scaffolding in the electronic condition was provided by an online monolingual English dictionary while a dictionary from the school library was used in the hard-copy condition. In the electronic condition students could carry out practice exercises (based on cloze procedures) focused on the words they did not know while in the hard-copy condition, students simply wrote down the unknown words and tried to remember their meaning. The 2 conditions were equally effective in supporting students' acquisition of new vocabulary, both with respect to immediate and delayed retention. It is suggested that computer-supported approaches to academic language learning might benefit from a multimodal approach that included paper-and-pencil activities, such as keeping a notebook log of new vocabulary, in addition to any practice exercises carried out on the computer.